Little Rock sits on a complex stack of terrace deposits, alluvial clays, and weathered shale — and you can’t read that from a boring log alone. The CPT rig pushes a cone into the ground and captures continuous resistance data every centimeter. That’s the difference. We work sites along the Arkansas River floodplain, up through the Maumelle formation, and into the swelling clays of the Wilcox Group. When a standard SPT hammer can’t resolve thin silt seams or a soft zone at 14 feet, the cone does. We run friction sleeve and pore pressure measurements to flag drainage problems before the excavator ever shows up. For deeper investigation in terrace gravels where refusal is expected, we often pair the CPT with SPT drilling to cross-check refusal depths and sample the coarser fraction directly. On commercial lots near the river, we also combine results with liquefaction assessment because the saturated alluvium can lose strength fast under seismic loading. This isn’t lab-only data — it’s in-situ, recorded as the cone advances, and tied to the actual stratigraphy under your footing.
A CPT sounding in Little Rock alluvium can reveal a soft silt seam at 12 feet that a boring log would miss entirely — and that seam controls settlement.
