Civil and Building Engineering.

In 1997 the European Regional Technical Committee 3 ‘‘Piles,’’ a group of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Foundation Engineering, sponsored a conference in Brussels to present European practice in the design of axially loaded piles. Papers were submitted by engineers from a number of countries. Of special interest is that most of the articles began with a section on the geology of their country: Belgium (Holeyman et al.); the Czech Republic (Feda et al.); Denmark (Skov); Estonia (Mets); Finland (Heinonen et al.); France (Bustamante and Frank); Germany (Katzenbach and Moor-mann); Ireland (Lehane); Italy (Mandolini); the Netherlands (Everts and Lu-ger); Norway (Schram Simonset and Athanasiu); Poland (Gwizdala); Romania (Manoliu); Sweden (Svensson et al.); Switzerland (Bucher); and the United Kingdom (Findlay et al.). Useful information, even if abbreviated, was presented about the geology of the various countries. The articles illustrate the importance of considering geology when designing foundations.

The late D. C. Greer, State Highway Engineer of Texas, renowned for his record of constructing highways in a big state, mailed all of the district engineers a map of the geology of Texas in August of 1946, where the presence of Taylor Marl was indicated. An accompanying document presented data on the poor behavior of asphaltic and concrete pavements on Taylor Marl and identified the material as an expansive clay. A later report in September of 1946 dealt with the performance of highways on other geologic formations and identified areas of Eagle Ford Shale and Austin Chalk. Mr. Greer urged state engineers to submit data on the performance of highways and cut slopes with respect to the local geology to allow such information to be disseminated for the benefit of engineers making highway designs.

The Nelson Mandela Bridge in Johannesburg, South Africa (Brown, 2003), was built across the city’s main rail yard of 42 tracks. The design of the foundations was complicated by the existence of a graben at a depth of 50 m near the center of the bridge. The highly weathered material filling the graben was unsuitable for supporting a foundation, so the bridge was designed with two pylons with foundations at the edges of the graben.