Delivering Site Investigations
6th April 2021
Northpoint Geotechnical – Exploring environments to strengthen your future. We are experts at providing site investigations. Delivering comprehensive consultancy services with innovation at the heart of everything we do.
Delivering Excellence
Northpoint provide expert geotechnical and environmental site investigations across the UK. In a nutshell, we are all about providing excellence in the following service areas:
- Preliminary assessments such as Desk Studies, Mining Risk Assessments, due diligence and scoping reports
- Intrusive Site Investigations – design and delivery
- Geotechnical Design and Project Management
- Earth Science Consultancy Services
- Detailed Land Contamination Assessments
- Ground Gas and Land Contamination Validation Services
We routinely collaborate with other public and private sector organisations. Furthermore, this ensures your project requirements are met on time and to highest possible industry standards.
Where we start
Northpoint’s site investigations normally commence at the Phase 1 Desk Study stage. Consequently this initial data (or evidence) gathering stage provides invaluable information. Ground investigation may miss vital data capture if a detailed preliminary risk assessment is not undertaken first.
As a minimum, Northpoint’s desk studies include a visit to your development site from one of our qualified engineers. We record important features and examine evidence of potential risks that may impact your proposed build.
We gather data from Landmark, Ordnance Survey, British Geological Survey, Environment Agency, Health Protection Agency and Coal Authority and process this information within the desk study report. By the time the Phase 1 is complete, we will have an in-depth understanding of the likely conditions beneath the site area. Therefore, we can predict with confidence potential constraints and features that require further consideration.
Theory Testing
Where necessary, Phase 2 Ground Investigation may be required to target all potential risks beneath the ground.
It is recognised that ground for building on is a hazard without site investigation. Therefore with safety in mind, we undertake detailed intrusive site investigations. This ensures your project build is appropriately designed. Therefore a range of exploratory methods may be required to build a detailed ground profile model beneath a site. This could include a range of land drilling techniques, to trial excavations, specialist probing and insitu testing. We routinely gather soils and rocks beneath a site and analyse these in a laboratory to finetune our understanding of what’s happening in the ground.
The intrusive phase and characterising a site informs our Phase 2 Ground Investigation Reports. As a minimum we consider in our technical reporting:
- Detailed geotechnical assessment to inform design, such as foundations and roads through to sustainable drainage.
- Land Contamination assessment – determining if your project is at risk from hazardous substances like ground gases and contaminated material that may be harmful to health.
- Overall production of a ground profile that helps us develop a realistic Conceptual Site Model for a project. This is also used to satisfy both design and regulators.
