A BB&N JOURNEY COMES FULL CIRCLE

As a student at BB&N in the ’90s, Dan Bronson ’96 likely never imagined he’d be an integral part of his alma mater’s strategic plan nearly 30 years later. But when his company, Bronson Drilling, was contracted to investigate an old retaining wall on the Grove Street site, Dan found himself in that exact situation. His below account of the project would be of particular interest to any science students at the school.

My business, which I've been doing since 2002, is drilling exploratory cores, soil borings, and wells for environmental and geotechnical assessments. My work at BB&N would fall under the geotechnical category, which is basically assessing site characteristics such as soil, bedrock, and groundwater to answer various questions about a site prior to construction (such as loadbearing capacity of soil, etc.).

In this case, I was contracted by McPhail Associates, the engineering firm contracted to BB&N, to determine two things:

1. Whether the 3-foot- and 4-foot-thick concrete blocks in the very tall retaining wall surrounding the site were stacked one-deep, or two-deep.

2. Whether the soil on the opposite side of the retaining wall was decent load-bearing soil, or if it was just a bunch of garbage, old shoes, ash, beer cans, dead bodies, etc.

They wanted to know this because they were planning on removing the wall, so they needed to know what they were getting into prior to taking it apart.

I drilled horizontally through the concrete and collected concrete cores in two locations. At one spot the concrete was three feet thick, at the other it was four feet thick. Once I was through the concrete, I collected a four-foot horizontal soil boring at each location for McPhail to be able to analyze.