BLUE MUD

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 7, 3 October 1929, Page 13

BLUE MUD

FOUNDATIONS OF NEW HOTEL

EARTHQUAKE OF 1855 RECALLED

Work in connection with the foundation of the £90,000 Majestic Hotel, on the site of the old Albert Hotel (at the junction of Boulcott and M illis Streets), is giving the contractors, the Hansford aud Mills Construction Company, a good deal of unanticipated trouble.

As the ground was being tested for foundations, deposits of sticky blue clay, with apparently no firm bottom, were discovered within a few feet of the Willis Street frontage, and as the tests were continued this deposit, at a depth of four or five feet, was found to be present over a considerable area of the new hotel site. This, taken in conjunction with other experiences in the neighbourhood, has engendered the belief that this bottomless strata of soft blue clay, which varies in its moisture content, is part of the old earthquake fault which runs in a north-easterly direction from the eminence formerly known as Flagstaff Hill to the harbour front.

With such a bottom to contend with, the plan of the foundations had to be revised to suit the ground. In one particularly bad spot where the clay became mud, it has been necessary to drive in a family of stout concrete piles, and elsewhere over the blue clay area, where the nature of the stuff is more firm, over a dozen holes —six feet square—have been dug to a depth of from 12ft. to 16ft., and filled up with solid concrete, so as to give the new building a firm footing. These masses of concrete will be used as the basis of the main steel standards, the foot of each one being firmly bolted to the concrete about 3ft. below the level of the ground. One portion of the old hotel on the corner still remajns as a bar (a necessity under the liquor license laws), and it is feared that the strata of bad ground extends under the building. Old residents of Wellington relate that in the big earthquake of 1855 the fault opened out into a crack which extended diagonally across from the Albert Hotel corner to the Duke of Edinburgh Hotel opposite, and on that occasion the crack exuded quantities of liquid blue mud. In the case of another new building, not a hundred yards away as the erow flies, this blue mud was encountered and had to be overcome by driving about 200 piles in close order about 40ft. into the deposit