The difference between building on the dense glacial till near the Saint-François River and the soft marine clay of the Saint-Nicéphore sector is night and day. One gives you a stiff bearing layer, the other behaves more like a viscous fluid under load. That’s why in Drummondville we rely heavily on the Ménard pressuremeter test (PMT) to quantify exactly how each soil horizon will react to a foundation load. Unlike drilling and sampling alone, the PMT gives us a direct measurement of the soil’s deformation modulus (EM) and limit pressure (pl) right in the borehole. For a project on the clay plain near the Centre Marcel-Dionne, we can run a PMT profile every 1.5 m and produce a complete stiffness curve down to 15 m. It’s the only way to get reliable settlement predictions in a region where the natural water content often exceeds 80%.
A single PMT profile in Drummondville’s marine clay can reduce foundation cost by 15% by eliminating unnecessary overdesign of the footing width.