There is a 10-foot deep, shotcrete lined creek with a pedestrian bridge being built over it. The banks are inclined at 1/2 to 1. The ground away from the banks is level. The bridge will use concrete abutments, 3 feet wide by 10 feet long, by 5 feet deep. The abutments will be about 10 feet...
I'm working on a site in Foster City on very soft Bay Mud, site class E. In running the software to obtain the seismic parameters, I got the message, "null-See Section 11.4.8" for Sms, Sm1, Sds, and Sd1. I don't have a copy of ASCE 7-16. I found a paper on what to do, but it was unclear. Any...
I have a landslide repair job with a proposed stitch-pier wall. There will be a leach field right behind the wall, so the permit agency won't allow a subdrain system behind the wall. The active soil pressure would be 50 PCF if it were drained. If pore pressures can build up behind the wall...
I've proposed a bioretention area for a project which is sized based on the runoff volume. This is in California and is based on the C3 Technical Guidance Manual. I used a void ratio for biotreatment soil and for Caltrans class 2 permeable material of 0.35. However, the County Planning Dept...
The fire chief wants me to prove that a gravel ranch road is adequate to support a 75,000 lb fire truck. Being a ranch road, traffic is very light. There will just be the occasional, if ever, instance of a fire truck driving by.
Normally, I use EAL, TI, etc., along with R-values to design a...
I need to find out how deep some existing drilled piers are. The house addition was built without a permit, and there are no records related to the drilled piers. They are 18-inch diameter concrete piers with rebar, located along an exterior wall of the house.
I could use a back hoe or...
I'm doing slope stability analyses on a small slope. It's under a building and never gets wet. No groundwater. The soil is slightly cemented silty sand, phi=45, c=600. The FSs are very high, as I knew they would be, but the County wants me to do the analyses, anyway.
The static FS is 6.5...
In autocad LT 2000, on some files, when I copy and paste, the paste insertion point is far from the mouse's crosshairs. In other words, if I zoom way out, I can see the object I'm trying to paste far from the cross hairs. So when I click where I really want the object to be, it ends up far...
I'm looking at a newly-built driveway that was built too steep. (The driveway goes DOWN to the garage.) The garage was supposed to be at 282.5 foot elevation, but was built at 280.5 feet. Now, the driveway is too steep to get a car in the garage. (I was hired after construction to fix the...
Problem: 50-year-old house on a steep (~40 degrees) slope, 5 feet of medium stiff clay over bedrock. Clay has PI=34, SPT blow counts ~10. House is on shallow spread footings, and the lowermost footing that runs parallel to the slope is rotating, and the deck piers below the house are...
When giving recommendations for a pier and grade beam foundation, what's a good way to account for lateral loads acting against the tops of piers and on grade beams due to soil creep on slopes?
In my case, it is a 2:1 slope, stiff expansive clay, and I estimate the upper 3 feet is prone to...
