Detection of buried foundations in urban environment by Electrical Resistivity Tomography

Detection of buried remains of old structures is not always an easy target for electrical or electromagnetical methods as sometimes there is a low contrast between buried remains and embedded rocks or due the interference of modern infrastructure which makes difficult to isolate the buried remains signal or limits the deployment of geophysical profiles. In this paper, we present a successful case study, where local geophysical noise sources were overpassed by using ERT method. High-resolution 2D models allowed to locate buried remains of old facilities and even to reconstruct the footprint of an old building which displayed a complex “L” shape. The 3D ERT resulted model allowed to compare different sectors of the building, to extract the most probable foundation structure (different on two wings) and to analyze the construction rubble filling material.