NEW FIRM OFFERS GEOTECHNICAL HELP

Shannon & Wilson, an employee-owned geotechnical and environmental consulting firm, now has an office in Jackson. The firm opened an office at 622 W. Jackson Blvd. on Sept. 1.

Shannon & Wilson provides such services as geotechnical engineering/consulting and instrumentation, geology and geophysics, rock mechanics and underground engineering, earthquake engineering, and environmental science, engineering and geohydrology.

Jeff Schauer, office manager of Shannon & Wilson's Farmington office, will manage both offices. Schauer has been with Shannon & Wilson for 14 years. He has been involved with subsurface exploration, field and laboratory testing, and development of design and construction recommendations for a variety of projects, many of them in Southeast Missouri.

Construction-phase materials testing is also provided for by Shannon & Wilson out of the Jackson office. Some of the services provided include compaction testing of earthfill to meet city or job specifications, testing of concrete and asphalt, as well as settlement monitoring of fills. Specialty work such as engineering oversight in installing and collecting data from inclinometers, extensometers, strain gauges, pressure transducers, among other instrumentation are within the firm's area of expertise.

Analysis of deep foundations capacity and monitoring of installation is also commonly performed.

Having an office in the Jackson/Cape area will cut travel time to projects and make engineers and technicians more readily available. Schauer said he is looking forward to the challenge of providing quality service at both locations, Farmington and Jackson. Both will be fully staffed with technicians, geologists, and engineers. The Farmington location will still be operating the only A2LA Accredited Laboratory in Missouri.

In addition to Schauer, the firm will employ Bobbi Price as administrative assistant and Andrew Clark and Lawrence Graves as technicians.

The move to Southeast Missouri was a natural for Schauer. He has worked extensively with the mining industry, performing design and permitting associated with numerous tailings structures. Due to the regulation of water discharges through the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System, he has also had to coordinate the design of dams and the release criteria written into discharge permits.

This experience with water flow modeling has moved him into stormwater management work with many of the smaller municipalities in Southeast Missouri that are only recently developing ordinances for stormwater control.

"As population continues to grow in Southeast Missouri, so does the need for more infrastructure," Schauer said. "The need for geotechnical consulting services during the investigative portion of project development, along with construction-phase materials testing, requires engineering firms with experience for a variety of different project types."

Everything from deep foundations analysis to slope stabilization, retaining system analyses, and other design considerations are well within the common types of analyses performed by Shannon & Wilson.

The Jackson phone number is (573) 204-8850 and the fax number is (573) 204-8855.