East Lake Geotechnical Drilling The Importance of Geotechnical Drilling
East Lake builders, land owners and developers use geotechnical drilling to determine what lies beneath the ground’s surface, typically in preparation for an upcoming building project.
This cost-effective solution allows you to get accurate, comprehensive information about the quality and composition of the underlying ground. If a structure is built upon unstable or poor quality ground, this can result in sinking, shifting and other changes that may cause serious damage to the building and its foundation.
Uses for Geotechnical Drilling
East Lake geotechnical drilling service providers offer a valuable service, which is especially important in Florida and in other parts of the country where the soil and ground quality is often less than ideal. For example, Florida has sandy soil with little clay. This means that the ground can be saturated with water very easily and shifting is fairly commonplace.
What’s more, the water can percolate down through the soil, reaching the limestone bedrock layer. Limestone is a relatively soft, porous stone and it has a major fault: limestone dissolves when exposed to acid, such as acid rain water or acids from soil. The water can capture the acids in the soil, bringing them down to the level of the limestone where the stone begins to dissolve. In time, empty cavities can form in the limestone. These cavities are prone to collapse, resulting in the formation of sinkholes. This is why Florida is especially prone to sinkholes.
In addition to evaluating the various layers of earth and stone, geotechnical drilling can also result in the discovery of potential sinkhole sites since the drilling process can reveal the location of voids in the limestone. Once discovered, those voids can be filled with concrete to stabilize the ground.
How it Works: Geotechnical Drilling
East Lake geotechnical drilling service providers will begin by bringing a portable drilling rig to the site, where they’ll bore down into the earth, filling a metal pipe/tube with a vertical column of earth. These samples are called cores and they’re obtained from multiple locations on the site.
The geotechnical drilling process varies in terms of the timeframe depending upon factors such as the size of the site and the type of stone and soil. In areas with hard bedrock like granite and clay-rich soil, the drilling process can be much more time consuming than a site with sandy soil and soft, porous limestone.
The cores are sent out for analysis to determine composition and the thickness of each layer, the moisture content and the degree of compaction, among other properties.
*Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of Amdrill Inc*
