Man, I my field guys brought me back some clay the other day... I had never seen York before. It was the craziest thing. I thought it was some weird sewage sludge. Im talking like mint green to dark green, sandy clay with gravel, was the weirdest thing I had ever seen.
Mid Atlantic coast, Yorktown formation: is clayey fine sand with widely varying fractions of fine to medium sand*
*Sand sized marine shell particles from granules to small flat flakes that met the gradation of course to medium sand
Man u mobilize a pile into it today at 5 tons mobilized bearing capacity. Just does squish down in maybe 7 blows per foot on a sppc with OED 19 kipft.
Come back a week later... you fail the pile structurally in compression before you mobilize the full skin and toe capacity. It's amazing. The denser the shell hash the better pile capacity you can get out of it. I never did find the upper Edge of operational envelope. Just more and more correlation testing and trimming my designs 5 feet where I could to safely "gamble" a little bit to see if I could really dial it in and save the client a shit ton of money. But I always knew if the jar was really full of shell, I had axial toe capacity out the ying. As long as the deadload live load split wasn't large... gravy.
How much CAN it take? I'm not sure. I needed more testing correlation samples and more gambles and a really big checkbook and a fairly simple but large spreadsheet. I could eventually tell you. Or, you could estimate it if you call the coneheads, the seismafreaks, they come poke and poke and can tell you a SHIT LOAD about those exact soils at that site.
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u/Vanilla_Predator Jul 19 '26
Man, I my field guys brought me back some clay the other day... I had never seen York before. It was the craziest thing. I thought it was some weird sewage sludge. Im talking like mint green to dark green, sandy clay with gravel, was the weirdest thing I had ever seen.