Deep Soil Stabilization of Foundation for Health Care Center in Liberty, TX

Location: Liberty Health Care Center in Liberty, Texas

Project Overview

Liberty Health Care Center is a well-established healthcare facility in the area of Liberty, Texas. They have exclusively served the geriatric population of the greater Liberty area for more than fifty years. The building is a wagon wheel style building built in the 1970s, where each wing of rooms is a leg, that extended out of the center. There is a total of six wings and three of which were experiencing settlement. The ground around the section of the building seemed to be very soft and damp and had a high composition of sand. The client’s biggest concern was to prevent the building from moving anymore and causing structural damage that could compromise the ability of the patients to be able to stay in their rooms. The challenging part of this project was because the soils were so loose, it took seventy feet of pipe before we were able to reach load-bearing strata.

Pushing the pipe down to load-bearing strata guarantees that the structure will be permanently stabilized and will not be affected by the loose soils.

Project Solution

Baird Foundation Repair was chosen by the client because of our expertise in deep foundation systems. They desired to find someone that would be able to permanently stabilize the foundation, so that for the time that they owned the building they wouldn’t have to spend any more funds on temporary fixes.

Baird Foundation Repair’s Commercial Solution Specialist, Will, visited the building of Liberty Health Care where he conducted a thorough inspection of the structure and the soil competency that the building was sitting on. In order to permanently stabilize the structure, Baird Foundation Repair recommended stabilizing the structure with push piers. Push piers would be the best solution for this application because it has the ability to advance through expansive soils to load-bearing strata. This approach is necessary in order to guarantee that the expansive soil that the structure is currently relying on, would not allow for more damage to happen.

In tandem with the push piers, we injected Polylevel to fill all voids under the slab, that may have been created by the lifting of the structure and to lift some areas with low elevations.

The completed job encompassed almost eighty push piers and just under two thousand pounds of Polylevel. The project was completed within nine working days!