Driven Steel Piles in Clay Shale on Northeast Anthony Henday Drive in Edmonton

ABSTRACT: The Northeast Anthony Henday Drive (NEAHD) project included the construction of 27 kilometers of six- and eight-lane divided roadway, nine interchanges, two road flyovers, eight rail bridges, and two bridges across the North Saskatchewan River, for a total of 47 bridge structures. The project was broken down into three smaller segments. The majority of the middle segment bridge abutments and bridge piers were supported on steel H-piles driven into the underlying clay shale bedrock. The QA program for the bridge pile installations included geotechnical monitoring of pile installations, including PDA/CAPWAP testing on approximately 10 percent of installed piles. This paper describes the results of geotechnical investigations carried out for the middle segment bridge structures, provides a description of the design and construction process, provides back-calculated pile design parameters based on construction monitoring results, and presents comparisons between pile design parameters that were adopted based on the geotechnical investigation results and the results of PDA/CAPWAP tests that were undertaken as part of quality assurance activities during bridge construction.