When a cone penetrometer truck pulls up to a lot on Las Olas or near Port Everglades, the first thing we check is the water table. In Fort Lauderdale, it sits barely a meter down. That shallow groundwater is what puts saturated loose sands in play for liquefaction. We run the CPT rig to refusal or 100 feet, measuring tip resistance and sleeve friction continuously, then pair it with SPT borings where the rig can't push through dense lenses. The lab receives Shelby tubes sealed at the ends, and we run grain-size analysis under ASTM D6913 to flag clean sands with less than 15% fines — the classic liquefiable profile. Every sample gets a USCS classification before the data enters our cyclic resistance ratio calculations. For sites near the Intracoastal Waterway where fill history is uncertain, combining CPT with a test pit helps us map the contact between recent hydraulically placed sand and the underlying Anastasia Formation.
Shallow groundwater plus loose Holocene sands means Fort Lauderdale sites demand a site-specific CSR/CRR profile, not a generic screening.
