Sky Ridge Medical Center
The Challenge
One major hurdle of installing new utilities at Sky Ridge Medical Center is that the ground is already full of utilities. The solution was to construction a new Utility Bridge that stands over 36 feet tall and extends approximately 160 feet between the Central Utility Plant building and the Main Hospital building. This left the challenge of designing and installing a foundation system to support four independent bridge towers while avoiding the existing buried utilities and minimizing any disruption to normal hospital activities. This was a challenge DRS was happy to accept.
Our Solution
The final foundation design required a total of 26 micropiles, each with a service load capacity of 100,000 lbs. It was also determined that the pier cap could not resist the anticipated shear loads because of the existing utility ducts and trenches adjacent to the foundations, this resulted in an additional 6,000 lbs shear capacity requirement of each micropile. DRS successfully designed, load tested, and installed 26 high capacity micropiles while avoiding all existing utilities.