Poor soils conditions at a new tank farm site in Panama led to the use of ground improvement for settlement control and mitigation of seismic effects. The ground improvement consisted of stone columns in the upper 17 m which were layered strata of loose silty fine sands and silts and preloading with wick drains to improve a layer of soft to medium stiff organic clayey silt from 17 to 26 m. The preloading was monitored with settlement plates, piezometers (and inclinometers at one tank) and the tank hydrotests were monitored with precision level surveys. The settlements during the preloading ranged from 1.5 to 2.2 m, which were about twice the estimated values based on high quality lab tests. This paper discusses the overall performance of the ground improvement, the use of Asaoka and hyperbolic methods to evaluate the preload, and the correlations of soils properties from lab tests with back-calculated values from the field data and modeling efforts with PLAXIS.
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