![]() A civil suit filed in Bathurst, N.B., alleges one home collapsed in part because the screw piles it was built upon were not properly installed.ĭuring flooding in 2017, the New Brunswick house was lifted off the piles. There was no engineer, to my knowledge, that was consulted," Cutler said.Ĭutler is comparatively lucky. The company insists it has "high standards." Cutler wishes he knew four years ago what was in the current CCMC bulletin - especially the part about having the project certified by an engineer. The company is currently in the process of repairing Cutler's cottage, four years after the posts were first installed. Once he started doing some research, he found that the installer hadn't installed the right sized posts or even enough of them. Watch as Ed Cutler rocks his cottage on its foundations:ĭuration 0:23 Ed Cutler paid a company $17,000 to stabilize his cottage, to no avail The siding squeaked as it visibly moved, despite the posts that are supposed to hold it in place. ![]() To demonstrate this, the retiree gave the side of the house a shove. "You can actually take and push on the side of the walls and see the building move," Cutler said. Putting finishing touches on the cottage has been near impossible because it has been so structurally unsound. In order to even use his cottage, Ed Cutler has had to reframe doors - and still his shower door hangs off-kilter. It warned that not following those guidelines "can compromise the load carrying capacity and serviceability of the corresponding load bearing foundations." The building moves The bulletin stated "every project is required to have: helical blades, approval of a registered professional engineer, welding that conforms to standards required corrosion protection, and a certified installer." "If we were to drive just within two miles of where we are here I could probably find you 50 to 70 houses," Reusing said.Īfter receiving the complaint, CCMC took the rare step of issuing a technical bulletin to industry and building inspectors across the country. ![]() He estimates, based on the number of projects he's seen, that millions of homes in Canada are affected by piles installations that haven't strictly followed the rules affecting everything from foundations to patios. Reusing filed a formal complaint with the CCMC and shared his lab findings, as well as other evidence he collected of helical pile installations across Canada that he says are not up to code. ![]() It also found non-conformance issues with welding and corrosion protection. The lab, Mequaltech, found some of the samples were not of the same steel grade promised in their CCMC specifications. We weren't actually expecting to come back with so many issues," Reusing said. We sent them out to third-party laboratories. We had four or so competitors install their piles. Julian Reusing, president at GoliathTech, filed a formal complaint with the CCMC and shared evidence he collected of helical pile installations that he says are not up to code. They are plunged deep into the soil using special equipment to shore up foundations and anchor structures in place. Helical piles, also known as screw piles, are long steel tubes with one or several helix blades welded onto their body. "When you do things incorrectly like that, you're basically putting your customer's public safety in jeopardy," said Julian Reusing, president of Magog, Que.-based GoliathTech, which lodged the complaint with the CCMC. The Canadian Construction Materials Centre (CCMC) confirmed it is visiting some helical pile factories after one manufacturer lodged a complaint in November alleging his competitors were cutting corners. The 59-year-old tried a number of homemade fixes, eventually resorting to crawling underneath the cottage and cranking up a series of little jacks to steady it. Ed Cutler tried a number of things to stabilize his cottage, and eventually crawled underneath the structure and cranked up a series of little jacks.
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