Too many contractors in Drummondville still rely on old borehole logs from neighboring sites, assuming the soil is uniform across the city. That assumption rarely holds. Drummondville sits on a mix of marine clay, glacial till, and river deposits from the Saint-François River valley, so conditions can change within a few hundred meters. Skipping a proper investigation leads to overdesigned foundations or, worse, unexpected settlement after construction. The CPT (Cone Penetration Test) gives you a continuous profile of the soil, layer by layer, without the gaps you get with traditional sampling. It’s a fast way to identify soft clay pockets or dense sand lenses before you pour concrete. Before mobilizing equipment, we often recommend pairing the CPT with a study of plate load tests to calibrate bearing capacity directly on site, or a permeability test in the field when groundwater behaviour is a concern.
A continuous CPT profile eliminates the uncertainty of discrete samples, revealing soft clay lenses and dense sand layers that boreholes can miss completely.