TECHNICAL
Overcoming Poor Soil
Geopier GeoConcrete® Column System can provide a
solution for extremely high loads in very poor soils
Structural foundations are often forgotten by most
people outside of the construction industry, even
though without those same foundations, most structures
would quite literally sink into the ground. As
anyone familiar with foundations can attest, they are far from
easy to design and can often be very costly, given the many
unfavourable surprises you might find underground.
Mark Tigchelaar, president of GeoSolv, a geotechnical
design/build firm based in Toronto explains that many
of the projects in and around major Canadian cities and
towns encounter unfavourable soil conditions that can often
threaten the budget and construction schedule of a project. A
staggering 80 per cent of work that GeoSolv takes on involves
some amount of undocumented fill. Undocumented fill is fill
By Bentzi Belfon, GeoSolv
PHOTOS COURTESY OF GEOSOLV
PILING CANADA 71
