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Foundation piling

RogerS

RogerS

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Mike talking about piling reminded me of this I heard about a site in the US. They'd done as much due diligence as they could and started putting the steel piling in for a new building. All piles rammed into the ground, all piles aligned.

The next morning they double-checked the heights of their piles to discover that quite a few were out of alignment and were higher than the datum. This can happen with some sub-soils, I believe? Anyway, they rammed them back again to the datum and left them for another day.

Next morning, not only had these pilings popped back up again but so had a few more. So they went back to basics and due diligence but nothing came up that would explain it. That is not until one of the workers got into conversation with an old-timer in a bar one night who chuckled and said that he was not surprised as there was an old and illegal tyre dump buried deep in the ground right where they were piling.
 
Funny if true, but I'm going to assume that's apocryphal unless I see some evidence otherwise. For a start, I would have thought that any "bounce back" from rubber would be almost instantaneous.
 
Funny, though I find it a little hard to believe that they buried tires that deep. It would keep the mosquitos out, though.:)

My ex-wife worked for a drilling & pile driving company, and they were working on what would be the tallest building in St Louis (~40 stories or something like that). The test drilling managed to straddle an enormous void in the limestone, which they promptly found when they started pouring concrete. I think it added a couple of hundred truckloads of concrete to fill it, but I could be far off on that.

Kirk
 
There are so many apocryphal tales out there!

The BBC used to have an Engineering Training Department at Woodnorton, Evesham. In the late 60's, they started digging to make a protected facility to continue broadcasting in the event if a nuclear strike. The stories abounded...

"They had the tallest tower crane in the UK and the jib barely cleared the ground by the time they'd stopped digging..."

"There were lorries taking away the spoil 24 hours a day, seven days a wee for a year"

etc ...etc.

Eventually we were given permission to go into the secret facility and make use of a studio for training purposes. We were all agog...quivering with anticipation..only to find that it was only two stories deep!! Not the plunging depths into the bowels of the earth.

We were also amused to see that they'd cocked up on the front blast door which could not be secured from the inside so the homeless hordes from B'ham could come storming in. And also rather than maintaining a positive air pressure inside, they managed to reverse it so that whenever the blast door was opened, all the leaves and debris got sucked in. As would radioactive dust!!
 
Depending on the geology, driven piles, in a close cluster can sometimes push some of the adjacent ones upwards by a small amount.
As a young graduate trainee, working on the Construction of the M3, I had the "lovely" job of being lowered in a cage down a series of 1 metre diameter shafts, 20m deep bored in the underlying chalk checking for swallow holes.
Once approved, they were then filled with free draining material to act as soakaways.
Just glad I didn't suffer from claustrophobia!

Rod
 
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