Geotechnical Drilling Progress Village Process and Uses for Geotechnical Drilling

Progress Village is home to many builders and developers who can benefit from geotechnical drilling, which can be used to evaluate the integrity and the composition of the earth in a particular location.

Geotechnical drilling can be used to obtain lots of important information about a site’s underground geology, including evaluating the composition of the ground and the various layers, determining the thickness of the underground layers, evaluating the depth of the bedrock layer and even identifying sites that can be prone to sinkhole formation.

Why Do You Perform Geotechnical Drilling?

Progress Village geotechnical drilling services can perform a drilling project over the course of a couple days for a small site to weeks or longer for a large site with dozens of different drilling locations. The price of geotechnical drilling operations is largely dependent upon the extent and nature of the project.

Geotechnical drilling is a cost effective method for extracting core samples. Portable drilling rigs are brought to the site, where the drill penetrates into the ground, extracting a vertical tube of earth that depicts the various layers, their depth and thickness, and the exact composition. These are important factors when building a new structure or addressing a potential issue with an existing structure. The core samples are usually sent out for analysis to evaluate the integrity, strength and moisture content of the earth.

Using the data from the lab analysis, a developer can determine if a site is suitable for a building project or whether revisions may need to be made in order to accommodate the ground composition.

Geotechnical drilling is also used for sinkhole detection. Sometimes, the underground voids that collapse into a sinkhole are found accidentally during a drilling operation, while in other cases, a known void is evaluated for size and depth. Once discovered, a void can be pumped full of cement which reinforces the ground and prevents a collapse into a sinkhole.

Areas with limestone bedrock are especially prone to sinkholes because limestone is a soft rock that dissolves when exposed to acidic groundwater.

Sinkhole remediation efforts that follow geotechnical drilling efforts can also include the placement of metal rods, which are affixed to a structure’s foundation and sunk into the bedrock. The geotechnical drilling operation can identify the depth of the bedrock. Once complete, these reinforcements prevent the building from collapsing if the ground gives way.

*Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of Amdrill Inc*