Infrastructure
Roads
From our base in Prince George, we have provided recommendations and review for highway realignments, bridges, rock and soil landslides, emergency closures and pavement upgrades across northern and parts of southern B.C. Our work includes a realignment of Highway 97 through the Pine Pass that included four bridges, preloading over soft valley deposits adjacent to oil and gas pipelines and BC Hydro transmission towers, large cuts in soil and rock, and design of transitions to thick, legacy pavement, and a realignment of Highway 16 west of Smithers that included a 40 m high rock cut with rock fall mitigation measures, and a large retaining wall on slopes overlooking Skeena River. Following extreme flooding events in the spring of 2011 and 2016, we completed emergency assessments and provided recommendations for highway closures and for temporary and permanent repairs of Highways 29 and 97 near Chetwynd and on side roads near Dawson Creek. The high water caused erosion and landslides that interrupted the highway in many locations during both events. Our follow up work included geotechnical investigations at several stream crossings that were upgraded to convey larger stream flows. We recently completed design of a four lane split-grade widening of Highway 97 that includes about 800 m of anchored retaining walls, stabilization of several historic slides, a 132 m long CN rail overpass and 900 m of railway grade.
Bridges and Large Culverts
We have a wide variety of experience with bridge foundations supported on deep, soft, normally consolidated glacial lake and glacial marine sediments, on glacial outwash deposits and on rock. The bridges are used for highways, railways, forest access roads and the mining industry for access and to support heavy industrial trucks. Our in-house CPT equipment provides an efficient method of obtaining high quality subsurface information for analysis of foundation bearing capacity and settlement. This equipment is particularly useful for analysis of pile foundations and structures on soft, compressible soil. Our engineers use a range of industry standard software and in-house methods for analysis of axial pile capacity, for lateral load-displacement analysis of individual piles and pile groups, as well as pile settlement, and pile driveability. We also use industry standard methods for analysis of bridge approach fill settlement, for liquefaction assessments of foundation soil and for stability analysis of the highway embankment fills.
Communications
The constantly increasing use of mobile devices and demand for wireless data has necessitated upgrades and expansion of existing networks. B.C. with its highly variable terrain poses unique challenges to locating, accessing and constructing new communications towers to expand service areas. GeoNorth has worked with Telus and Rogers Communications and their consultants to assess terrain stability conditions, carry out field investigations, assess access road locations and tower sites and provide geotechnical recommendations for design of spread footing foundations on soft subgrade soil, rock bolts and micropiles in rock.
