Drilled Pier Failure Investigations

Too often we witness under-construction or recently built structures experience damage, collapse, and/or total loss as a result of varying causes, which require forensic investigation into the failure. Such failure investigations are warranted to identify causation, liability, and repair measures. The focus of this paper revolves around structures with drilled pier foundations that exhibited failures during or recently following construction. Our forensics investigations and analyses on these cases were similar and for purposes of discussion, have been combined. The investigations employed non-destructive and destructive testing to determine the causation of the foundation failure(s). The combination of these measures, in conjunction with review of the project documents, resulted in determination of the causes of the displacement to be a material failure of the pier on Exemplar No. 1, failure of the bearing strata on Exemplar No. 2, and inadequate foundation system design on Exemplar No. 3.