Paper Mill

What do you do when your floor is collapsing? That was the question being asked by a paper mill in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. This company had been dealing with areas of the floor becoming damaged by heavy equipment for over two years. After doing some preliminary inspection, they discovered that voids had been created when water had washed away the grade under the floor. The weight of equipment in some areas had caused the floor, and even one wall to begin to collapse! Before being able to design a solution to their problem, the paper mill management needed to find out the full extent of the problem.

To achieve this goal, the company hired Ground Penetrating Radar Systems in March of 2007 to perform a void mapping survey on the ground floor of their paper mill. Ground Penetrating Radar has performed similar services in the past for other reputable companies. Nathan Machel and Mitch Ross of GPRS teamed up to do this job as efficiently as possible.

Nathan and Mitch spent four days on site at the mill. While on site they collected Ground Penetrating Radar data over five large areas, finding almost 50 void areas below the slab. While GPRS was still on site, several test holes were drilled in the slab to determine the average void thickness and confirm the results of the ground penetrating radar. According to the test holes, the Ground Penetrating Radar was 100% accurate at locating voids.

At the end of the job, the paper mill management was provided with a report detailing the location of each void. This report also gave the sample thicknesses and the area of each void. With this information the company can design a plan to fix these voids, without the high cost of demolishing entire sections of floor, or the even higher cost of shutting down mill operations for an extended period of time.