Total advice for the physical environment

With eleven offices in the south of the country, Aelmans Adviesgroep is a leading consulting organization in the field of the physical environment. "We are very broadly oriented and focus on the fields of Real Estate, Environment, Environment, Agro and Construction," says geotechnical consultant René Kroonen of the Aelmans Adviesgroep. "This broad expertise enables us to realize a total solution to realize our clients' ambitions." Aelmans is therefore constantly investing in people and equipment.

"Despite Covid-19, our industry is very busy," Kroonen begins. "That manifests itself in an awful lot of requests and a lot of work in progress for our three soil agencies: Aelmans Eco, Archimil Construction and Environmental Consultants and NIPA Environmental Engineering. We are always looking for motivated people who want to be trained in-house as CPT or drilling engineers with BRL certificates. It is absolutely a wonderful profession and nowadays transformed into an 'office job on location'. We are mechanizing a lot. As many operations as possible are done mechanically with our modern machinery, which will soon be further expanded with a new CPT truck."

14-ton outlet track

Aelmans Adviesgroep's new CPT truck involves a 14-ton deposit caterpillar. "With this mini-trailer we can basically perform the same tasks as with our regular CPT truck, only the compact size makes this track much more versatile," Kroonen explains. "Cities and towns are often built up. New construction is therefore increasingly taking place on infill sites where space is often limited and accessibility is not optimal. This is where we can go with our caterpillar. With the new crawler we will soon be able to perform more 'normal' pressure probing, instead of only heavy impact probing. The latter technique in particular is a research technique that is widely used in the south of our country and not 'known' in the west. It has everything to do with the local base which in the south is more comparable to the countries around us than to the rest of the Netherlands."

Probing the Meuse

With its various disciplines, Aelmans Adviesgroep offers a total picture for clients. "We can work very efficiently by calling on other areas of expertise within the company where necessary. That makes us really unique and ensures that we can tackle projects from A to Z, from zoning plan and permit process to performing soil research and preparing drawings," Kroonen says. "Besides on land, we also recently completed a nice project on water. Rijkswaterstaat is planning to replace the breakwater over a length of about 700 meters near Sambeek Lock. To measure the bottom resistance and bottom structure, we carried out pore pressure probes on the Maas from a workboat with our CPT truck. Through a "moonpool" we were able to probe up to about 20 meters below the water table. Something different for our CPT and drilling superintendent as well."

By continually investing in people and equipment, we try to maintain our leading position, Kroonen summarizes. "The next drilling rig is already on the wish list. But motivated people are also welcome to apply."