Pile Driving at Lake Michigan

When you live on the bluffs overlooking the shores of Lake Michigan, retaining walls can be serious business. And when your next-door neighbor’s ultra-modern house is made predominantly of glass, the concern about the potential for structural damage from pile driving for a new retaining wall can be even more serious.

Alan Levine, principal of Chicago-based The Lighthouse Companies and lead engineer overseeing the project, recommended the use of vibration monitoring equipment during the pile-driving phase of the project. “The need for vibration monitoring while driving piles for a new retaining wall not only mitigates my client’s risk – it makes for good neighbor relations,” he said.

Levine and his crew wanted to place a vibration monitoring device in the optimal location to read potential vibration impact. The challenge: poor cellular reception at the spot he needed the device to be placed. “Putting it anywhere else wouldn’t give us the readings we needed,” Levine said. “I needed a solution that could be placed where I needed it to be and had a flexible antenna option as well.”