Posted on 10/04/2005 4:45:07 AM PDT by Maria S
A child's clubhouse, built about 25 years ago by a civil engineer for his son, provides another clue pointing to possible design or construction flaws in the structural failures that breached two canal floodwalls and inundated the city during Hurricane Katrina.
Engineer Gus Cantrell, 60, and son Daniel Cantrell, 33 &150; now a structural engineer himself &150; returned to the family's Pratt Drive house last week for the first time since Katrina struck. They discovered the old clubhouse sitting a few feet from its original location next to the London Avenue canal levee &150; on top of a pile of mud and silty sand about 8 feet high.
The Cantrells believe that extreme pressure from high water pushed soil under the base of the floodwall away from the canal and upward in an arc, something known as a heave. That appears to have raised a mound of earth into the back yard under the clubhouse. The wooden clubhouse's base is now even with the edge of the house's roof, Daniel Cantrell said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nola.com ...
Got it, thanks.
I was interested because there is a chemical plant here that had contaminated the surrounding area and they were looking into similar technologies to prevent the contaminants from further leaching out and affecting the groundwater and the surrounding neighborhood. They were looking at a curtain some 200 feet deep, surrounding the plant, which is roughly a mile square in area.
To All, bentonite can be considered, for non-engineering purposes, to be "clay", which may help in understanding the technology under discussion.
Yeah, simply put it's a Wyoming sodium montmorillonite clay. Well, the good brands, anyway.
For applications 200 feet deep, a backhoe will not work. IIRC, the deepest digging backhoe is owned by RECON from Houston. GEOCON is another excellent slurry trench contractor.To go 200', an clamshell on a crane will be needed. In this case, I think TREVIICOS is the company to go to.
ICOS, predecessor to TREVIICOS did the first structural slurry walls in America at the World TRade Center. I had the opportunity to work with several people who were involved with that project (All old guys from Italy).
Now that's a backhoe!
When I started doing construction work in the sixties, you were lucky to have a tractor on the site, and if it had an end-loader and a backhoe, you were really "uptown"-- that was a lot of labor-saving help back then.
Now, I see large machines like that tracked excavator everywhere.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.