Geotechnical Drilling from Maviljan to Arthur's Seat

Welcome to the beautiful Mpumalanga province. This project took us to the province to conduct geotechnical investigations. With 177 holes to drill, a combined depth of just over 3000m over a distance of 20km. Our teams knew that they had their work cut out for them. At our disposal, we had a total of 9 drill rigs available that were to be manned by experienced Geomech Africa drillers. At the helm of the project, we had our branch manager, Dries de Beer, who had to navigate the project and the various teams to ensure that we advanced to each hole as quickly as possible.

Before the project could commence, we had to meet with the community leaders for each area that we would be drilling in. To help things along, we engaged with the appointed Project Liaison Officer for Route R40 to act as an intermediary between our crews and the area leaders. These appointments proved to be invaluable to our project as they were to manage any casual labourers and assisted in the preparations for getting us from one drill location to the next.

While drilling the first holes, we soon discovered weathered subsurface conditions which made recovery of the core extremely difficult and put a lot of strain on the drill bits. As a result, the runs had to be shortened and more SPTs had to be conducted to extract recovered material in these weathered areas. To factor in for the weathered ground conditions, each hole’s planned drill average was extended from 21m to 30m per hole. Regardless of these delays, our crews were able to make up for lost time within two weeks on the days we were behind.

Drilling was successfully completed on the 10th of June 2023, another successful drilling campaign completed.