A 15-story mixed-use project on Las Olas Boulevard required a 28-foot cut adjacent to a 1940s masonry building. The contractor’s preconstruction survey had flagged the sandy limestone contact at minus 12 feet as a potential groundwater conduit, so the monitoring plan had to track lateral movement and pore pressure simultaneously. Coastal Fort Lauderdale geology alternates between Pleistocene Anastasia Formation caprock and loose quartz sand, and the water table sits barely five feet below asphalt in the wet season. Without continuous deep excavation instrumentation tied to a geotechnical baseline report, even a minor tidal shift can push a sheet pile wall past its deflection threshold before anyone notices. The field team installed four inclinometer casings, twelve settlement points on the adjacent sidewalk, and a vibrating-wire piezometer string in a borehole set back from the shoring line to capture real-time data during dewatering.
Monitoring is not overhead; it is the only way to verify that the shoring design assumptions survive contact with Fort Lauderdale’s groundwater regime.
