For owners
What to Look For in the Borings
Owners are handed a geotechnical report and told it is technical. Four things in it decide most of the cost, and you can find all four yourself.
Send the geotechnical report and the site plan. You get a written read on the water, the excavation and the risk.
The four things that decide the money
You do not need to be an engineer to get real value out of a geotechnical report. Four items drive most of the cost and schedule risk on a Florida site, and all four are findable in ten minutes.
- The water table depth, and whether the report says it is tidally influenced.
- Any refusal or rock layer, at what depth, and whether it appears in every boring or only some.
- Organic or muck layers — thickness and extent, because that is removal or piling.
- The recommendations section, which usually names the foundation types the engineer considers viable.
- How many borings there are relative to the footprint. Too few is itself a finding.
The question that matters most
"How much does this vary across the site?" A report showing consistent conditions in every boring is a very different risk to one where boring three found rock at eight feet and boring four found muck at twelve.
Variability is what turns a fixed price into a change order. Where a report shows it, the honest response is more investigation before the number is fixed — not a bigger contingency and a hope.
What a contractor should tell you after reading it
Which methods it rules out, which it rules in, what the dewatering is likely to cost, and where the schedule risk sits. If a contractor prices your excavation without asking for the report, they are pricing a guess.
We will not price dewatering without borings. It is the single most common source of change orders in Florida ground, and a number produced without data is a number that will change.
FAQ
Common questions
- Do I need a geotechnical report?
- For anything with an excavation or a foundation of consequence, yes. It is cheap relative to what it prevents.
- How many borings?
- The geotechnical engineer decides from the footprint and the variability found. Too few is a finding in itself.
- Can you price without one?
- Not the dewatering, no. We would be guessing, and the guess becomes a change order.
- Who commissions it?
- Usually the owner, directly with a geotechnical engineer. That keeps the report independent of the contractor.
Next step
Find out what is actually wrong with it.
An inspection, photographs of what we found, and a written scope. If the honest answer is that it can wait another season, that is the answer you will get.