With bedrock more than 200 ft below street level, the fifty-eight-story Millennium Tower, like most downtown high-rises, is founded on piles driven through soft, compressible clay soils deposited by the San Francisco Bay and extending into a...
The Brooklyn Basin project revitalizes 65 acres along Oakland’s waterfront, transforming an industrial site into a mixed-use development. The new neighborhood offers more than 3,000 residences, public parks and trails, a new marina, and 200...
The Girard, named after American textile designer Alexander Girard, is a mixed-use apartment building located in Boston’s vibrant South End. The building offers 160 luxury residential units, ground floor retail, two levels of below-grade...
The prospective owner of 343 Sansome Street, a prime commercial property in downtown San Francisco, wanted a detailed due diligence survey. The building, consisting of a series of additions, was built on fill once part of the San Francisco Bay...
SGH has worked with Berkel & Company Contractors, Inc. (Berkel) for many years providing structural engineering services to support their installation of piles at numerous projects.
The 1100 Broadway project combines the adaptive reuse of the Key System Building, which was heavily damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, with the construction of a new twenty-story building. SGH was the structural engineer for the...
The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) owns and operates five facilities that treat Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs)during storm events before it reaches Boston Harbor and its tributary rivers. As part of the Boston Harbor...
The intermodal Quincy Commuter Boat Terminal provided access to the commuter ferry and historic U.S.S. Salem museum. The site consists of a bulkhead seawall and a reinforced concrete wharf. In November 2011, a water main located...
Originally a single-family house, the two-story, timber-framed building in Nantucket Harbor was in serious disrepair. The owner wanted to preserve and rehabilitate the building on North Wharf and as part of that effort, they needed to raise it...
For the R.O. Pickard Environmental Centre digester expansion program, the owner's engineer envisioned two structurally-identical, modified, egg-shaped digesters founded on drilled piers extending 80 ft to bedrock. The general contractor elected...
Steeplechase Pier, located in Coney Island, Brooklyn, was damaged by Hurricane Sandy in late 2012. During reconstruction of the pier in 2013, the mooring “spud” of a construction barge failed and the barge rammed into the pier, seriously damaging it. Their article outlines the response to investigate this damage and develop repairs, details the challenges of completing an investigation that determined the condition of the piles, and discusses how the aggressive schedule to reopen the pier ultimately determined the chosen repair scheme.
For integral abutment bridge (IAB) design, there is no consensus on the preferable orientation of the piles supporting the abutment, although variations can affect overall bridge behavior and forces in the piles. This paper details a parametric...
On Wednesday, 19 November 2014, SGH’s Stephen K. Harris and Kenneth A. Klein presented at the 2014 SEAONC (Structural Engineers Association of Northern California) Fall Seminar titled “Design and Construction of...
By: Robert Holland, Kurtis, Kimberly E., Moser, Robert D., Kahn, Lawrence F., Aguayo, Fred, Singh, Preet M.
Abstract: The article presents a forensic investigation of precast prestressed concrete piles removed from the I-95 Turtle River Bridge, near Brunswick, GA. The piles exhibited extensive damage that led to the discovery of unexpected threats to...
Abstract: Below-grade waterproofing and temporary earth retention systems should be coordinated and designed in tandem to maximize continuity of the waterproofing system. We discovered that some designers and contractors do not consistently...
Abstract: As discussed previously in Untreated Submerged Timber Pile Foundations -- Part 1 (STRUCTURE® magazine, December 2013), deterioration of pile tops exposed above groundwater levels is a well-known problem. It is less known that...
Abstract: This article, Part 1 of a 2-Part series, provides a summary of the state of knowledge on bacterial biodeterioration on submerged and untreated timber piles, as well as a discussion on the impacts of time and deterioration on the in-...
Abstract: Untreated wood piles supporting buildings in cities historically built on urban fill are subject to increased biological deterioration due to localized groundwater drawdown, predominantly caused by man-made construction. Groundwater...
Abstract: Wood-destroying fungi are the predominant damaging biodeterioration agents affecting the performance of untreated wood piles supporting historic buildings today. At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, when this type...
When wood foundation piles deteriorate, they can become incapable of supporting the buildings founded on them. This article, Part 1 of a 3-part series on pile biodegradation, discusses the available investigative techniques aimed at quantifying,...