Soil Stabilization for Florida, Georgia & Alabama Projects
We depend on the ground beneath our feet to support us. Most of the time the ground holds up its end — but when a project asks more of it, sometimes the soil needs help rising to the challenge.
Problematic Soils
Building structures, laying roadways, and operating heavy equipment all ask something of the soil beneath them, and that soil isn't always ready for it. Soils containing gravel, sand, silt, or clay often need an extra boost of strength before they can bear that kind of load. Loose granular soils are especially prone to settling under gravity, while clay-type soils swell and shrink with changes in moisture, creating movement of their own. Organic matter buried in the soil decays over time too, leaving voids that make the ground beneath it unstable.
Problematic Environments
The environment the soil sits in matters just as much as the soil itself. Florida's soil varies widely by region — red, loamy soils and poorly drained sandy soils in North Florida; peat soils near the Everglades and shallow, limestone-influenced soils farther south. On top of that, Florida ground regularly deals with heavy water exposure, whether from daily rain, tropical storms, or low-lying swampland. That combination creates real challenges for anyone trying to build safe places for Florida residents to live, work, and travel — which is exactly why Solid Foundations offers soil stabilization.
Soil Stabilization Benefits
- Eliminates the need to export unsuitable material and import new material
- Lowers soil permeability
- Higher resistance values
- Better soil compaction
- Reduced plasticity of the soil
- Reduced minimum pavement thickness required
- All-weather access to and within the project site
Stabilized soil also holds up better environmentally — it resists the erosion that heavy storm-water runoff can cause, helping preserve surrounding soil, waterways, roads, and habitat.
Our Process
Solid Foundations uses chemical grouts to fill voids, fortify soil, and form sub-grade grout barriers near roadways, dams, seawalls, tunnels, and underground vaults. We apply those grouts using two methods:
Permeation grouting. A slow, controlled injection of polyurethane foam into the soil, allowing the foam to penetrate before it expands. We then add a measured catalyst (such as water) to expand the foam and bind the soil together, creating an impermeable mass that increases the soil's load-bearing capacity. We use Prime Resins' Prime Flex 910 and 920 polyurethane foams for this process.
Compaction grouting. Also an injection of polyurethane foam, but using a formula that expands rapidly — in about thirty seconds — to immediately fill voids and compact the surrounding soil under expansive pressure. As the foam swells up to twenty times its size, it forms dense structural columns that increase the soil's load-bearing capacity.
Chemical grouting gets a site traffic-ready within about fifteen minutes of application, by which point the foam has reached roughly 85% of its strength. When settled soil has already caused a concrete slab to sink or rock, we can pair our grouting process with slab lifting to raise the slab back to its original position — whether that's a concrete highway, a warehouse floor, or an entire building.
Trust Your Soil to Solid Foundations
Whatever the soil type or the specific problem — erosion, runoff, swelling, poor compaction, improper footing embedment — Solid Foundations has the geotechnical knowledge and field experience to inject the extra strength your soil needs to hold up a building, roadway, slab, or heavy equipment. Contact Solid Foundations today to talk through your soil stabilization needs.
Recent Foundation Repair Projects
