Foundation for Strorage Building

[Gary316]

can I get aaway designing a foundation without testing for bearing capacity for a storage building?

 

[MotorCity]

Yes, but with a few carefully worded notes on your drawing. For smaller projects, we typically do not have a soils report provided. In this case, we state the assumed bearing pressure on our drawings and require the contractor to hire a geotech engineer to verify. We also stipulate that changes to the foundation design may be required based on the actual bearing pressure. Either way, the owner pays for a report up front or once foundation excavation begins. Your assumed bearing pressure should be close to that of the local soils based on your previous experience in the area. Be careful, bearing capacity does not always drive the foundation design.

 

[Okiryu]

If this is not a large project, you may use the presumptive values for bearing pressures indicated in IBC Table 1806.2, and then add a note in your drawings that the selected value needs to be verified by the contractor's geotechnical engineer. You can also check design documents for existing buildings around your site to feel comfortable with your selected value. I also agree with Motorcity on his above post. If you have fine grained soils, the foundation design may be controlled by settlement and no by the bearing capacity. So, be careful if you don't have a geotechnical report on hand.

 

[hokie66]

Be very wary of proceeding without geotechnical investigation, or at least prior knowledge of the area by a practicing Structural Engineer. If you don't know anything about the site, investigate. It is not a good look to design a building, begin construction, then discover that you are building over a solid waste dump. You didn't indicate your location on the face of the Earth, and the answer would vary markedly with various authorities.

 

[Okiryu]

hokie66, agree... sometimes clients told us to prepare a preliminary geotechnical report based on desktop research of available data nearby the project site, once the actual geotechnical investigation is done, we have found a lot of discrepancies and new things form the available data provided by the client....

 

[oldestguy]

Define the building some, such as size and construction type. My 6 by 10 foot storage building wouldn't qualify, but when does it start?