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.
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