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What is the allowable bearing pressure of the footing nearest the wall? Without digging through the code, that seems to be the logical surcharge load that should be appled to your retaiing wall. You'll need your geotech to come up with the resulting horizontal and vertical pressures.

I'm not sure how it will effect the vibration analysis, but have you considered drilled shafts as opposed to piles? The dynamic response of the shaft would likely be different than a pile.

Typical? Not really. It will depend upon how expansive the soil/shale is, how you are loading it and what the structure is. First step should be several lab tests to determine how expansive the soil is.

Do I think the practice of geotechs being a comodity will change? Honestly, No. What I have found over my career has been the larger the company you work for, the larger the more complex the projects are, and the client is more willing to spend the money for proper investigations. It's a...

civilperson, As soon as owners (or the person with the money) stop selecting a geotech firm based solely on price and start looking at the experience and proposed explorations you'll probably see a change in the recommendations. It's not the case every time, but too often the low bid geotech...

There is a debate raging in my office about the use of a pocket penetrometer in fine grained samples retrieved from a standard split spoon sampler. I say that this is absolutely wrong as the split spoon sample is disturbed and will not give you "accurate" results. Correlations have been...

It appears that most of the discussion as been directed at the footing of the retaining wall. Is the retaining wall going to be backfilled to a new elevation with fill material? How high is the fill material? Has anyone evaluated the earth pressures resulting from the new fill (if there is...

What we are finding is a shortage of Civil (and particularly geotechical) engineers in the 10 to 15 (maybe a bit bigger spread?) year experience range. I happen to be in this group and have a pretty good idea why the shortage. When I started at University of Idaho computers, software and the...

If you are doing a Proctor test, don't be surprised if instead of a traditional "curve" you end up with a somewhat flat line that bounces +/- 5 lbs up and down as you move up in moisture. I've seen that numerous times.

My experience (and that of literature I've seen) indicates the capacities indicated by dynamic testing are less than those from static testing. The great thing about dynamic tests are that you can do many tests throughout the project which is particularly handy if you have changing conditions...

Perhaps a call to your local geotech firm would be a good start. It sounds like a fairly nasty subsurface set up.

Be aware that some local requirements state that a "greenway" needs to support an emergency vehicle (ie ambulance). It's pretty crazy but I ran into that problem once.

molten - It's exagerations like this - "Just look at the pine beetle infestation and the way it has spread across the Rocky Mountains- beetles literally raining from the skies like some biblical plague." that turn people off from believing anything related to global warming information...

What's an impact pier and what are you testing it for?

I have a short list of references that may help you: B.C. Simonsen, 1997, "Mechanics of Ship Grounding", Ph.D thesis, Department of Naval Architecture and offshore Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark B.C. Simonsen and T. Wizbecki, 1996, "Grounding Bottom Damage and...

More than likely you will receive rutting due to the turning radius. Crushed rock will eventually lose some of the fine contents due to rain and the top surface will become closer to a gap graded stone. Without the fines, the stone will have a tendancy to move a lot more than when freshly...

Some projects just arent' worth doing - this appears to be one of them. I'd suggest walking away. If they client won't pay for a proper geotech investigation what else won't they pay for?

There are two types of geopiers - one in which aggregate is rammed into a predrilled hole and a second that is rammed into the soil with no predrilling. I've seen several presentations about geopiers at conferences but have never used them myself. The one project I worked on where they were...

Thanks, I didn't realize this superceded the paper I was looking for.

This is a COE publication that is no longer available on their website. Does anyone here have a pdf copy of it which they are willing to share? Thanks in advance.