Arash Yazdani: If you don’t mind, I’d like to take that question with another one because they’re kind of related. I’ll start with the anchor. One of the challenges with the anchors is going to be our subsurface condition.
Let’s think about the three common subsurface conditions we did talk about in the presentation. That’s going to be soft, rock, hard rock, or soil overburden.
One of the challenges with the earth anchor is penetrating the rock. And then in terms of the actual engagement of the anchor in the bedrock, it’s not able to really perform like it’s intended to. How they work is you pound a steel rod, then there’s an anchor at the bottom, and then there’s a mechanism that creates tension. And then that rotates a piece of steel that creates an anchor in the ground. It can only disengage in soil. There are some challenges when you’re dealing with bedrock.
The issue or the concern when it comes to the table with soil is the hurricane season. Obviously, installation, getting it in, is not a problem.
When you have a soil site, that means it’s going to be easily erodible. And if the soil is easily erodible, there’s a very good chance you could compromise the soil cover over the actual earth anchor. Meaning that if it becomes uncovered, it’s not going to do its job. If it comes uncovered, it’s not engaged in the soil anymore. And it’s not going to give you your resistance.
We have used earth anchors as a last resort to remediate piles where there are lateral issues. But to be honest with you, in a lot of cases, we only got to that case because a contractor did the work unsupervised and they ended up not following the design, and all other remediations were too costly. We used the earth anchor because that was the best means in the situation we were in.
I wouldn’t say that earth anchors should be a status quo foundation design, but they definitely could be used as a remediation option as a last resort. And I will say that if your project has gotten to the point where you’re using that as a last resort, you are going to want to circle back and verify your QC and your contractor’s installation process. There are probably some challenges there that can probably be corrected for future projects, which would eliminate the need for those risky foundation types.
Vishal Lala: Thank you for that.