Too many foundation bids in Fort Lauderdale come in blind—relying on old county soil maps instead of real borehole data. We have pulled auger after auger through clean sand that looked competent on paper but refused to hold a simple spread footing. The Standard Penetration Test clears up that ambiguity fast. Every two feet of penetration gives you a measured blow count and a disturbed sample you can log, photograph, and reference later. In a city where the water table sits just a few feet below the slab and limestone can switch to loose sand in half a block, skipping site-specific SPT work is a gamble that costs more than the rig mobilization.
Our crews run truck-mounted CME rigs that can handle the tight access typical of Fort Lauderdale’s older beach neighborhoods, and we pair the SPT profiles with a grain-size analysis when gradation matters for liquefaction screening or drainage design. For sites where silty layers complicate drainage, we also recommend an in-situ permeability test to get realistic infiltration rates before finalizing the stormwater plan.
SPT refusal on shallow limestone in Fort Lauderdale is rarely the end of the story—more often it masks softer material beneath that governs settlement.
