Woocheen’s experts in the geotechnical businesses think about these things every day. Understanding the nature of soils and how stable and permeable they are is a key part of the ground-investigation work Gregg Drilling and Causeway Geotech do. Recently, Causeway expanded its capabilities considerably by bringing engineer Chris Anderson on board.

“Chris is one of the best geotechnical engineers in Ireland,” said Causeway Director Paul Dunlop. “Having him on the team has given us the comfort that we have truly great technical expertise.”

Chris specializes in soil stabilization, which is an increasingly popular tool to improve problematic (low strength, highly compressible) soils. In recent years, it has become more common to mix substances - such as lime, cement, and/or cementitious waste products such as GGBS and PFA - into soft soils to improve their engineering properties and allow them to be utilized for construction. Doing this prevents the need to excavate the site and cart the soil off to a landfill or other location, avoiding an approach that’s wasteful and harder on the environment. Chris has used soil stabilization not only as a ground improvement technique, but also for the formation of retention walls, remediation of failed slopes, and the containment of ground contamination – the latter being work Woocheen’s remediation teams do every day.

“It’s quite a cool business,” Paul said. And it expands possibilities for collaboration across Woocheen’s businesses.

For example, Gregg Drilling has been investigating levee stability in Northern California for many years. Freshwater infrastructure in Northern California is critical, carrying water from the Bay Area to the more arid part of the state via hundreds of miles of canals, tunnels, pipelines and dams. After Hurricane Katrina destroyed similar, smaller systems in New Orleans in 2008, it became clear this California infrastructure needed attention. One idea being explored is to introduce underground tunnel transports in certain sections of the system. Soil stability will be key to that.

Now Woocheen’s businesses have the capability to better understand and design solutions for soils in projects like this. In addition, Bay Area-based CS Marine is poised to handle some of the marine construction work that will be needed.

Tim Boyd, chief operating officer at Gregg Drilling, noted that the geotech industry is small and word gets around fast when great people join an organization. That’s helpful to winning and keeping work.

“If I’m working with someone and they hire good people, I’m inclined to give them more responsibility,” Tim said. “It demonstrates they know what’s up and they put together a good team.”