Nicholson Construction Company

Nicholson Construction Company is a geotechnical specialty contractor based in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, working in deep foundations, ground improvement, earth retention and dam remediation. Its scope covers drilled shafts, micropiles, ground anchors and tiebacks, slurry walls, grouting and excavation support, the work that decides whether a tower or a dam gets built at all and rarely shows up in a rendering. The trade is under scrutiny after a piling rig toppled at a Brickell tower site in Miami in September 2026, injuring four. Post-tensioned rock anchor work of the kind used across the USACE Bluestone Dam Safety Assurance program in West Virginia is the same specialty discipline. The firm is a subsidiary of Soletanche Bachy.

Arthur Nicholson started the company in his Pittsburgh basement in 1955, driving piles for steel mills and the expanding interstate system. Much of what the US geotechnical industry now treats as standard practice traces back through that company. In 1976 Nicholson introduced the first high-capacity micropile in the country – the Pin Pile – for Shenango Steel. Earlier, a 1970 joint venture with Universal Anchorage produced two more firsts: the first permanent soil anchor in the US, installed for the Corps of Engineers in South Haven, Michigan, and the first permanent rock anchor, in Butler, Pennsylvania. On the Boston Big Dig in 1993 the firm installed the first US soil mixing support system, for the Ted Williams Tunnel and Central Artery Tunnel, and made its jet grouting debut on the same job.

The emergency callout record is the other half of the resume. In 1998 Nicholson installed 536 micropiles beneath Mandalay Bay before its opening, each fitted with a permanent frame and jack so the foundation mat could be lifted and stabilized. Less than a month after 9/11 the company was at the World Trade Center stabilizing basement excavation supports. In 2014 it ran a round-the-clock operation at Wanapum Dam, installing large anchors including underwater work, to prevent failure.

Recent work shows the same techniques at infrastructure scale. The Kraemer/Nicholson joint venture delivered a stormwater storage facility along I-35W for MnDOT under an Early Contractor Involvement contract, combining six diaphragm wall shafts, deep well dewatering, cross passages, jet grouting and a pump station. The company also returned to the New York market for the first time since the mid-2010s, installing a 215,000-square-foot diaphragm wall along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn for NYCDEP, providing excavation support and groundwater cutoff for a four-million-gallon CSO tank.

The published toolkit runs to fifteen techniques – anchors, augercast piles, barrettes, chemical grouting, compaction grouting, diaphragm walls, drilled shafts, jet grouting, micropiles, permeation grouting, rock grouting, secant pile walls, soil mixing, soil nail walls, and soldier pile and lagging walls – organized around four markets: water, energy, buildings and industrial, and transportation. Parent Soletanche Bachy was itself acquired by Vinci in 2007.