Screw Piles in Rocky View County, AB

Below the surface in Rocky View County

Do not read this as a page about a town, because Rocky View is not one. It is a municipal district that surrounds Calgary on three sides, with no town centre, no typical soil and no standard screw pile design. On the west side — Bragg Creek, Springbank, Bearspaw — the ground is dense foothills glacial till with cobbles, and solid rock can lie fairly shallow in spots. On the east side — Langdon, Conrich, Indus — it is the plains clay that also underlies east Calgary and Chestermere. Everything between those extremes is in the county too, shifting mile by mile as you cross it.

That means the truthful answer about Rocky View soil is less about its type and more about its range. Acreages on adjacent roads may need different pile lengths, different shaft diameters and now and then a different foundation altogether. We are not hedging when we say so. It is the reason torque verification counts for more here than anywhere else in our radius, and why a price quoted by phone off a postal code is not worth much.

There is another consideration towns do not have. Very little in the county is hooked up to municipal water and sewer; most properties depend on a private well and a septic system. Required setbacks from the well and the disposal field restrict where any new structure may be placed, and a septic field creates a wet pocket of soil you should not build right beside. The buried lines running to the well, cistern and field are also seldom quite where the owner thinks they are.

The projects we see locally

Work in the county means acreages and yard sites: post-frame shops, machine sheds, riding arenas and animal shelters, plus decks and additions on older farmhouses and on the big custom homes in Springbank, Bearspaw and Elbow Valley. Getting to the site can constrain the design as much as the soil does — long gravel lanes, gates built for a pickup and not a boom truck, power lines strung over the yard, and spring runoff pooling on the driveway.

Helical screw piles also fit rural sites for reasons unrelated to the ground. No ready-mix truck has to make it in, there is no pile of excavated dirt to bury or truck away, and framing does not wait on concrete to cure. When the closest batch plant is far off down a gravel road, that matters.