OXNARD : Firm Wins 1st Prize for Soil Engineering

For Fred Romani, who is a licensed geotechnical engineer, the building project at Hueneme Road and Arcturus Avenue presented a difficult problem because the soil was unstable and would not hold the proposed commercial-industrial building.

“Our job, before the construction of a building, is to evaluate how good or how bad the soils are and what needs to be done,” Romani said. “At the project in Oxnard, we found a very bad place, the soils were very poor, full of water, like Jell-O. With any kind of shaking, it would liquefy like mud.”

Romani, who is a project engineer at Buena Engineers Inc., of Ventura, said he spent many sleepless nights trying to solve the soil problem without adding costs to the project.

The solution was to strengthen the soil down to 10 feet with a combination of layers of rock and geofabric, a fabric made of plastic fibers. The work done on soil preparation for the Van R Dental building by the engineering firm garnered it a first prize recently in an engineering competition sponsored by the California Geotechnical Engineers Assn.