San Jacinto Monument: New Soil Data and Analysis Including Subsidence
Publication: Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 141, Issue 6
Abstract
The San Jacinto Monument was built in 1936 to celebrate the 100 year anniversary of the battlefield victory that gave Texas its freedom. Ray Dawson was in charge of the foundation design and decided to instrument the foundation to monitor the settlement of the Monument. The settlement has been recorded since 1936 and provides a very valuable long-term record. This settlement and other geotechnical data were studied and reported by Briaud and his co-authors in 2007. That study was based on data available at the time, which was primarily from a 61-m-deep boring in 1953. In 2007, Fugro and Texas A&M University drilled a new boring with sampling to a depth of 78 m, conducted in situ tests to 36 m, and laboratory tests on the samples recovered. Updated settlement calculations are provided using this new data; they show reasonably good agreement with modern settlement techniques. One of the issues possibly affecting the settlement readings is the subsidence of the ground surface, which can reach 3 m in that area of Houston. A second part of this article presents calculations and numerical simulations to evaluate the influence of subsidence on the recorded settlement of the Monument. It is shown that the true settlement of the SJM is 295 mm while the measured settlement is 328 mm. The reduction is due to the different influence of the subsidence on the settlement of the shallow benchmark and of the Monument.
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Acknowledgments
The work at Texas A&M University was sponsored by the Spencer J. Buchanan Chair. The authors wish to thank Philip King for saving the hard copy files from disposal in 2002 and allowing Texas A&M University to study it. These data were originally collected by Raymond Dawson, professor at the University of Texas and later kept by McClelland Engineers; when Fugro took over McClelland Engineers, Joe Cibor, Recep Yilmaz, John Juenger, and their colleagues continued to cooperate on this major piece of Texas history. Fugro sponsored the 2007 site investigation and laboratory testing with the help of Texas A&M University for PMT testing. The authors also wish to thank Bill Elsbury for providing valuable information about subsidence at the Monument location and Bengt Fellenius for a thought-provoking discussion of the 2007 paper.
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Published In
Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering
Volume 141 • Issue 6 • June 2015
Copyright
© 2015 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 7, 2014
Accepted: Dec 30, 2014
Published online: Feb 25, 2015
Published in print: Jun 1, 2015
Discussion open until: Jul 25, 2015
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