Foundation 801 Service areas Salt Lake City
Service area · Salt Lake County
Century-old foundations on Lake Bonneville clay, right against the fault.
Most of the valley floor sits on fine-grained Lake Bonneville lakebed sediments — silts and expansive clays that swell when they take water and shrink when they dry. A footing on that soil is riding a seasonal cycle, every year, for the life of the house.
The Avenues and Capitol Hill run to 1890s–1920s brick with rubble-and-mortar or early unreinforced foundations. Those walls were never engineered for lateral load; they were stacked. Sugar House and Yalecrest add 1920s–40s stock with early poured walls.
The Wasatch fault runs along the east bench through the city, and unreinforced masonry is the most seismically vulnerable construction Utah has. Foundation work on those older homes is often where a seismic retrofit becomes practical to do at the same time.
The Avenues · Capitol Hill · Sugar House · Yalecrest · Liberty Wells · Rose Park
Elevation readings, crack widths and a written scope your engineer can read. Free, and we will tell you plainly when what you have is cosmetic.
Call (801) 644-9000 Request assessment