Structural Engineers in Dublin

City sites set the problems. There is rarely room to store anything, the neighbours are close, the street cannot be closed for long, and the frame has to go up in an order the site can take. That is where precast and a temporary works design earn their place.

Four councils, not one

Dublin has four local authorities, and each is the planning and building control authority for its own area: Dublin City Council, Fingal County Council, South Dublin County Council and Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council. Each has its own development plan and its own drainage requirements, so the first thing to settle on a Dublin job is which council it answers to.

Surface water across the region is designed to the Greater Dublin Strategic Drainage Study, which sets out how much a site may discharge and how it has to be held back. We prepare the drainage, the flood risk assessment and the Uisce Éireann applications that go with a planning application in all four.

The ground in Dublin

Much of the county sits on glacial till, the stiff Dublin boulder clay that carries a foundation well but does not take a soakaway. Near the quays and the coast the ground is made ground and soft deposits over it, and a building there is often on piles. A basement next to an existing building adds the question of what holds the neighbour up while the hole is open.

What a site investigation finds on ground like that, and what it decides about the foundation, is in our piece on what the ground decides.