During infrastructure developments and construction projects, you may come across various kinds of problems, especially managing excessive quantities of water while excavating.
Such issues would usually occur when you have –
- Shallow water table
- Permeable bedrock and soil
The contractor should expect to deal with such considerable volumes of water flows. Moreover, along with complicating the managing of the routine construction site, it could affect the budget and schedules negatively. As a result, it would suffer the quality of work. In most cases, an installation of the dewatering system would be vital for drawing down the water table permanently. Gather more information about the work of hydrogeologists at lclenvironnement.com.
You could manage such problematic situations upstream with ease. Introduce a significant and sufficient hydrogeological element into the preliminary environmental and geotechnical studies. Rest assured the hydrogeological element in such kinds of studies would be neglected. However, it comprises a decent estimate of the depth of the water table.
How is hydrogeology helpful
It would be worth mentioning here that hydrogeological elements would be intended to evaluate the hydrogeological and geological aspects.
These would be inclusive of the following –
- The water table depth
- The geological description of prevalent bedrock and soils
- Managing the quality of groundwater
- Permeability and hydraulic conductivity of the prevalent bedrock and soils
- Hydraulic gradient and flow direction of the groundwater
Activities performed for hydrogeological studies
The following activities would be performed on the site to achieve hydrogeological studies –
- Groundwater sampling
- Hydraulic conductivity test
- Piezometric level survey
- Installation and drilling of observation wells
The highly permeable bedrock and soils require a more exhaustive analysis, inclusive of pumping tests and pumping wells. Such gathered data would help determine the basic parameters of hydrogeology. It would assist in expecting the infiltration problems related to groundwater during excavation.
It would analyze the following aspects –
- Determining the flow and volume of groundwater based on the depths you require reaching or carrying out the excavation
- Developing efficient excavation dewatering and drainage methods inclusive of pumping wells, sump pump system at the bottom of the excavation, and well points at the edge
- Assists in determining the need for installing waterproofing membrane under the foundation
- Managing discharge of groundwater, dependent on its quality
- A comprehensive design of the permanent dewatering or drainage system after excavation and construction of the infrastructure, if needed for
- Using pumping wells for designing a water table drawdown
- Sizing and designing a drainage system under the infrastructure and the edge
These tools would also be required for optimizing the design of the drainage system and dewatering methods. Such tools would enable hydrogeologists to determine the expected flow of the water accurately or optimize the dewatering systems.
