Soil & Bedrock Testing

Pipeline design, pipe jacking, directional drilling and foundation studies require detailed subsurface soil and bedrock testing. Typically, this information is obtained by drilling borings. It is not uncommon for borings to miss critical features, including areas of shallow or deep bedrock, fractured bedrock zones, areas of subsidence or sinkholes. NDT’s approach to soil and bedrock testing is to fill in the gaps between borings with geophysical seismic refraction, electrical resistivity and GPR data to provide a continuous soil and bedrock profile between borings and minimizing the risk of missing a costly subsurface anomaly. Or, if borings have not been drilled, we will use geophysical testing to locate features of interest in soil and bedrock so that they can be drilled and evaluated in detail.

Existing borings can also be used to conduct cross-hole or vertical seismic profiling measurements. Cross-hole measurements are used to obtain soil and bedrock compressional and shear wave velocity data for seismic risk analysis. Vertical Seismic Profiling (VSP) data are used to identify subsurface low velocity zones typically indicative of sinkhole development or solution cavities/voids.