Manual Vibration Monitoring

John V. Dinan Associates provides manually operated seismographs (see Vibration Monitoring specifications) for projects requiring there be a technician on-site during construction activities. Usually, this type of vibration monitoring is required when there is drilling or pile driving involved. Depending on the size of the project we shall recommend the number of seismologists and vibration monitors to adequately monitor the vibrations caused by construction activity. Once our seismologist(s) are on site, they shall set up the monitors in the predetermined locations and set the monitors to record at a certain criteria.

The typical setting is 1.92 in/sec PPV with a threshold of 0.5 in/sec PPV. The threshold is set at a much lower limit in order to ensure that 1.92 in/sec PPV is not exceeded. These settings change based on projects requirements, the conditions of adjacent structures, whether the project is in a historic district, and if the adjacent structures are historic landmarks. The vibration monitoring instrumentation used are component instruments. The seismograph shall continuously monitor construction vibration while our technician ensures that the threshold value is not exceeded.

We install and remove our equipment, provide the vibration monitoring readings on a daily basis, are present to relocate the monitors depending on where construction is taking place, and render a weekly report and opinion, in triplicate, for your records. In our weekly reports we state the source of vibration, include the actual data/graphs that list the date and time of each recording, and provide a conclusion based on the vibration levels.

The main purpose of vibration monitoring is to measure, record, and analyze the vibration levels at a specific location. From this we are able to determine the possible effect of these vibrations and confirm that the vibration levels are below the specified threshold.