clients are primarily in Ontario, although it has worked as far
west as Alberta. GeoSolv’s projects have included tanks, wind
towers, retaining walls, slopes and liquefaction mitigation, as
well as a variety of other structural applications. Tigchelaar
is a licensed engineer in both Ontario and Alberta; he is the
past chair of the Canadian Geotechnical Society-Southern
Ontario section and is a member of the Canadian Society
for Civil Engineering, the Deep Foundations Institute, the
Canadian Design-Build Institute and the Railway Association
of Canada, as well as a number of local Ontario construction
associations.
Since GeoSolv’s inception in 2006, the company has been
the local design-build installer for the Geopier Foundation
Company’s range of specialized patented intermediate foundation
systems, many of which improve the ground in place
and support loads through friction. The alternatives are often
to dig out and replace bad soil or to put deep foundations
down into the bedrock below and utilize a full structural slab,
he says.
“For a slab on grade building – a commercial structure
or a big industrial warehouse – the challenge with piles is
that you must span across these hard points coming up to
the surface, and that can structurally be quite expensive. One
of the biggest advantages in utilizing ground improvement
over deep foundations is the use of conventional construction
using standard spread footings and unreinforced slabs.
“Seventy to 80 per cent of the jobs we do involve some sort
of undocumented fill,” said Tigchelaar. “And might contain
things that would be expensive to deal with if you had to dig it
up and replace it with engineered soil. In the Greater Toronto
Area, most sites with good hard soils near the surface have
already been developed. The leftover pieces of land tend to
COMPANY PROFILE
CONTINUED ON PAGE 56 54 Q4 2016 www.pilingcanada.ca
/www.pilingcanada.ca
/www.pilingcanada.ca
/www.pilingcanada.ca
