Staff
They may just be piles of dirt, but the truckloads of earth brought to the site of the new Robert Moore School are an important step in its construction.
“It’s called a site pre-load,” Raymond Roy, manager for Plant Operations and Maintenance, told trustees at the Rainy River District School Board’s meeting last week.
This type of site preparation is needed because the soil underneath is not firm enough to support the planned structure, he noted.
“Our structural engineers determined that there’s two options,” Roy explained. “You can go with the pilings, and what they determined is if we went with the pilings to support the building structure, it would have needed 107 pilings at a depth of about 39 metres each.
“It’s fairly expensive.”
Instead, this pre-loading method—using loads of dirt to consolidate the soil below—was chosen.
“We ran all that by our cost consultant and going with the option that we’ve chosen has saved the project approximately $400,000,” Roy noted.
Now that the earth is in place, there is an approximate six-week pre-load time frame until the soil is consolidated to the correct level,.
When this is achieved, the dirt will be removed and the school will have a shallow foundation with spread footings on compacted granular base, he added.
Roughly half of the dirt currently on the site then will be used on the project, Roy explained, adding the other half will be sold back.
Trustee Terry Higgins noted the total amount of dirt trucked in was just over 1,400 loads.
La Vallee trustee Glenda Belluz also praised the chosen method for site preparation for the jobs it brought to the area.
“A couple of our neighbours and people in our area commented to my husband [La Vallee Coun. Jim Belluz] about the pile of dirt,” she noted. “They were really happy about the pile of dirt because it gave so many jobs and put so many truckers to work.”
If, on the other hand, the piling method had been used, Belluz noted no one from the district would have benefitted job-wise, and it would have had to be passed on to a business outside of the area.
