Basic HTML Version
24
Geotechnical News • March 2013
www.geotechnicalnews.com
GEOTECHNICAL INSTRUMENTATION NEWS
Introduction by John Dunnicliff, Editor
This is the seventy-third episode of GIN. Just one article this time. As
you’ll see below, I’m struggling to find contributors.
Field monitoring challenges
I’ve agreed with colleagues at Monir
Precision Monitoring Inc., Missis-
sauga, Ontario, a specialized monitor-
ing contractor, to include in GIN a
series of articles titled
Field Monitor-
ing Challenges.
Here’s the first one.
Our purpose is to tell about challenges
that occurred in the field, their resolu-
tions and the lessons learned. Straight-
forward practical stuff!
Lessons learned. I need you
A significant number of articles in
recent GINs have described new and
emerging technologies. It’s been excit-
ing for me to learn about these, but I’d
now like to take a step towards nuts-
and-boltsy things, and lessons learned,
primarily lessons learned from
unexpected events in the field. All of
us in this business have such stories to
tell, and if we share them we can learn
from each other. So – please – ask
yourself whether you could contribute
some of these stories for GIN. They
don’t need to be complex things, and
you can refer to “Project X”. I well
understand that you may have diffi-
culty with employer or client approval,
in which case I’m happy to refer to
you as “Anonymous”, and promise not
to disclose your name to anyone.
In the past, I’ve had very little
response to pleas for contributions,
and have usually had to rely on arm-
twisting.
Please let me hear from
you.
Smile for the day
When I was checking out of a hotel
recently, the receptionist had just put
her phone down and was laughing. I
asked her to share the joke. She said
that the call was from a man in one of
the rooms, asking how he could get
out of his room. “I told him that there
were two doors, one to the bathroom
and one to go in and out of the room”.
He said, “But that one has a sign on
the handle saying,
“Please Do Not
Disturb”.
The next continuing education
course in Florida
This will be on April 7-9, 2013 at
Cocoa Beach. If it’s cold where you
are, come and join us, and keep warm!
Details are on
www.conferences.dce.ufl.edu/geotech.
Also see the announcement on page
27.
Closure
Please send contributions to this
column, or an abstract of an article for
GIN, to me as an e-mail attachment in
MSWord, to
john@dunnicliff.eclipse.co.uk, or by
mail: Little Leat, Whisselwell, Bovey
Tracey, Devon TQ13 9LA, England.
Tel. +44-1626-832919.
Kippis (Finland)
Field monitoring challenges. Episode 1
Unforeseen piling details and damage to inclinometer casing
Marcelo Chuaqui and Wing Lam
Introduction
We have agreed with the editor of GIN
to contribute a series of articles, titled
Field Monitoring Challenges
. In these
articles we will describe situations
where the recommended monitoring
practices could not be performed,
followed by the solutions to and
consequences of these challenges. We
present these from the perspective of
a specialized monitoring contractor,
believing that there is value in shar-
ing our experiences and the lessons
learned.
In an ideal world we all could execute
perfect monitoring programs. We
would be able to utilize a systematic
approach to the planning and execu-
tion of each project. The process of
systematically planning and execut-
ing a monitoring program is well
understood and defined in texts such
as Geotechnical Instrumentation for
Monitoring Field Performance by John
Dunnicliff.
However, real-world constraints force
implementation of less than ideal mon-