This project site is located in a historic district in Downtown Toronto. It will involve the redevelopment of an historic building to accommodate a 34-storey high-rise tower with one level of basement. Due to the historical significance of the existing building, the client was required to maintain and incorporate some of the existing building facade into the proposed building structure. Additionally, due to the legacy operations on the site and vicinity, there was potential for significant environmental impacts to the soil, groundwater and potentially the shale bedrock. The project has the unique challenges of an existing building of historical significance which has a footprint that generally occupies most of the property and limited headroom which prevented access to conventional boring/coring equipment for soil/groundwater investigation purposes.

B.I.G. Consulting Inc. (BIG) was retained to provide geo-environmental services including environmental, preliminary hydrogeological and preliminary geotechnical assessments to support the proposed development.

BIG worked with a specialist drilling contractor who built a specially adapted drill rig to access areas with limited space and headroom while having the necessary horsepower to core shale bedrock to carry out a subsurface investigation with strategically placed boreholes and groundwater monitoring wells and appropriate number and spacing of boreholes to obtain the necessary data to support the Phase Two ESA, preliminary hydrogeological and preliminary geotechnical investigations, concurrently and in a timely and cost-effective manner. Concurrent investigations provided a significant cost benefit to the client for project upfront costs and the approach taken enabled BIG to provide generalized subsurface information to support reasoned decisions to be taken with respect to property development planning, design and construction moving forward.