The sequence of strong earthquakes in Canterbury in 2010 to 2011, most notably the devastating Mw 6.2 earthquake on 22 February 2011, the source of which was located within Christchurch, resulted in 185 fatalities and extensive damage to buildings and infrastructure. Liquefaction occurred on several occasions through the…
ABSTRACT The City Rail Link project connects the existing Britomart rail terminus in Auckland’s CBD with the Mt Eden Station on the North Auckland Line. The c.3km-long route traverses a wide range of geology and ground conditions. Most of the tunnelling will be within…
Introduction The Scott Base Redevelopment Project (SBR) aims to modernise the facilities at Antarctica New Zealand’s Scott Base with extensive reconstruction of most of the current infrastructure. Golder was engaged to provide a geotechnical assessment to support detailed design of the proposed redevelopment. This article…
Introduction There has not previously been a standard template in New Zealand for the specification and procurement of ground investigation work, and specifications varied significantly from project to project and between organisations. Long project specific specifications were unlikely to be fully read by tenderers (at least…
Abstract Until 2017 there was no standard template in New Zealand to assist in the specification and procurement of ground investigations, and so consequently specifications varied significantly from project to project and between organisations. This caused numerous problems: (1) Long project specific specifications were unlikely…
The concept of transferring geotechnical data between all industry parties in electronic format is widely used internationally. As computer technology has become an integral component of the geotechnical industry, producers and users of geotechnical information have adopted digital database systems to store, manage, analyse and present their data. Currently,…
The major events of the Canterbury Earthquake Sequence (CES) caused significant land and building damage in Christchurch between September 2010 and December 2011. The extensive damage necessitated detailed ground investigations and liquefaction hazard assessments to inform repair and rebuild options. Relying solely on intrusive testing to provide sufficient…
In this paper we describe two case studies where a combination of geophysics and ‘conventional’ geotechnical techniques was used to characterise the sites for risk associated with voids in the near surface soils that could potentially collapse. One is a former mine site where the…
A number of field testing techniques, such as standard penetration test (SPT), cone penetration test (CPT), and Swedish weight sounding (SWS), are popularly used for in-situ characterisation. The screw driving sounding (SDS) method, which has been recently developed in Japan, is an improved version of the SWS technique…
The gel-push sampling technique was developed to try to provide an economic technique capable of obtaining high quality specimens of silty sands and sands. This paper describes two of the gel-push samplers which are now commercially available and describes their performance on recent projects carried out on…
