Condon-Johnson & Associates

Condon-Johnson & Associates is an Oakland, Calif., specialty foundation contractor. It grew out of Kulchin and Associates, a shoring company credited with the first soil-nailing job in the Western Hemisphere, which Kiewit alumni Mike Condon and James Johnson took over and renamed in the 1980s, and it cites a safety record going back to 1976. These days it’s drilling shafts and piles, building shoring and earth retention, and doing ground improvement, grouting and dewatering from offices up and down the West Coast. On the $137 million SR-71/SR-91 Interchange Project in Corona, Condon-Johnson handled deep foundations for Skanska USA Civil West, working in overnight windows next to live freeway lanes after the city rejected a 55-hour closure of the 91.

Five service lines, one drilling fleet

Condon-Johnson sorts its work into deep foundations, earth retention, ground improvement, grouting and dewatering, and each heading covers more methods than the label suggests. The piling side alone includes auger cast piles, known in the trade as continuous flight auger piles; drilled displacement piles; drilled shafts advanced dry, under slurry or inside segmental casing turned by an oscillator or rotator; micropiles; driven precast, H- and pipe piles; torqued-in piles; and bottom drop piles for low-headroom work.

Earth retention, which the firm also calls shoring, runs from soldier pile walls in cantilevered, anchored and internally braced configurations through sheet piling, shear pins, horizontal drains and access shafts. Circular secant pile walls and cutter soil mixed walls cover the cases where a soldier pile system will not seal. Underpinning is done with slant piles, micropiles, chemical or compaction grouting, or hand-mined pits where no rig will fit.

For ground improvement the toolkit is deep soil mixing in single-axis, multi-axis and cutter configurations, stone columns, aggregate piers, drilled displacement columns and rigid inclusions beneath a load transfer platform. The grouting group works a different set of problems: compaction grouting to densify loose granular soils, cut liquefaction potential and lift structures that have settled; jet grouting to build soil-cement columns and panels for underpinning, excavation bottom seals and tunnel pre-treatment; permeation and dam grouting using cement, asphalt, polyurethane or sodium silicate mixes; and compensation grouting to reverse settlement caused by tunneling. Published examples include the grout curtain at Calaveras Dam, void grouting at Tabor Dam, and compensation grouting on San Francisco’s Central Subway.

Two things an owner’s engineer will care about. Grouting is recorded on real-time monitoring equipment, so mix, pressure, flow rate and cutoff volume can be changed mid-stage, and the closeout package includes 3D drawings giving the location, depth, orientation and grout take of every injection stage. On drilled shafts the firm offers crosshole sonic logging, gamma-gamma testing and thermal integrity profiling.

Engineering sits inside the company rather than alongside it: professional engineers are on staff, and president James Johnson holds several geotechnical patents, serves on the Deep Foundations Institute board, and has served two terms on the ADSC West Coast Chapter board and on its industry advancement fund. The office list reaches past the coast. Oakland is corporate, with Antioch, Los Angeles, Lakeside near San Diego, Kent in the Seattle area and Portland on the coastal run, plus Bozeman, Montana and Centennial, Colorado inland. The firm is privately held and family-owned, and safety is run by a named corporate safety director rather than delegated to the field.