Geology documents

Geotechnically Speaking…

While Stillwater continues to get answers from the various city boards, I only have one thing to share as March wraps up, a few weeks ago I received the final report from GeoConcepts on their analysis of my land.

Way back, GeoConcepts was retained to quickly assess if the plot I was looking to purchase was buildable. Given the short time frame, they accomplished that through research and looking at what was on file for the surrounding properties. Since I moved forward with the purchase, I continued with them to investigate the full range of geological conditions as well as analyze the soil. They were able to dig test pits to determine how deep the bedrock layer was as well as get the soil work done, but until I had a topographic site survey done and a site plan – they could not complete their work. After getting the survey work done, I engaged with Stillwater, and now have a pretty detailed site plan, so GeoConcepts was able to finally complete their report.

The report is impressive and I won’t go deep into the 155 pages of content it contains, but the first 30 pages cover the overall scope of my project, site description and field exploration, summary of findings, conclusions, and recommendations – with these last three being the most interesting. Essentially bedrock is fairly shallow on the property and “has sufficient strength to support the proposed development” and although the land is in an earthquake landslide zone, “based on the stability analysis earthquake-induced landslide hazard at the subject site is low.”

The remainder of the report are all the charts, graphs and data tables to support the conclusions and recommendations – including a large printout of the site plan mapped against the geology (some early versions of these drawing were shared in an earlier post). All fun to look at, but mostly outside my understanding.

Lastly, this entry posted very late from when I wrote it since I neglected to renew my hosting for the site (whoops!) and everything was down for about a week. I took care of that, realized I really need to pay closer attention to my personal email, and everything seems to be working again. Since we’re already deep into April, I’ll get another entry up soon about all the little things I’ve been doing to advance the project while waiting on everything mentioned last time.