In 2007 the US Army Corps identified Wolf Creek Dam in Kentucky as one of the top 6 dams that are “critically near failure or have extremely high life and/or economic risk…” This structure is […]
A nifty BIM-type view of the proposed bored tunnel for Washington SR 99, the tunnel to replace the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct along Seattle’s waterfront. It’s pretty neat to see the piles and foundations for […]
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been enjoying watching the 2010 Olympic Winter games over the past few days. If you have, you know that Whistler is the venue for many of the sports including alpine skiing, luge, skeleton, bobsled, ski jumping, biathlon and cross-country skiing among others. The Whistler area is located about 50-miles or so North of Vancouver. In order to get to Whistler, you need to drive along Highway 99, better known as the Sea-to-Sky Highway. This highway has a long history of geotechnical problems, including some significant structurally controlled rockslides and landslides. In the years leading up to these Olympic Games a fair amount of work was done on the highway with some significant geotechnical innovations.
I was reading the ASCE News, January edition which announced the 5 finalists for the 2010 Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement (OCEA) Award and I was struck by the significant geotechnical engineering and geoengineering components of these projects. Read on as I highlight some of things hidden beneath the ground of these remarkable projects. […]
The Burj Dubai Tower has recently reached it’s final height of 818m (2,684-ft or almost exactly 1/2 a mile!). The foundation system for the Burj Dubai is comprised of 192 bored piles (drilled shafts in my practice) 1.5-m (approximately 5-ft) in diameter and approximately 50-m deep (164-ft). A 3.7-m (12-ft) thick raft foundation sits on top of the piles under the full footprint of the structure. (Image from BurjDubaiSkyscraper.com)
The geotechnical investigation for the Burj Dubai (now to be known as Burj Khalifa after the UAE President) is described in detail in a paper by the geotechnical engineer of record, Grahame Bunce of Hyder Consulting (UK) and the independent technical reviewer for the geotechnical design, Harry G. Poulos of Coffey Geotechnics. Click through for the link to the paper and more details. […]
And a train was actually hit! Fortunately it was stationary on the tracks, but it crushed the side panel of the driver’s carriage. Neither the driver nor any passengers were injured in the incident. The […]
Robert Thompson at Dan Brown and Associates posted a paper he and Dan wrote on the kcICON bridge. From the DBA website: I have added the paper that we wrote and Dan presented at the […]
Root Piles (or "pali radice" to use the Italian term) were used to underpin a famous Victorian Era London Hotel this fall in preparation for its refurbishment and re-opening in October 2010 as the new […]
A drilled pier wall is an example of a retaining wall that you might use when global stability or bearing capacity considerations preclude you from a shallow foundation for a conventional retaining wall. In this […]
Issue Number 3 was released with some excellent papers including “Leaning Tower of Pisa: Behavior after Stabilization Operations”, “The Washington Monument Case History” and “Reconstruction of Konstantinovsky Palace in a Suburb of Saint Petersburg”. (Image […]
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