50 Years of Chance Instant Foundations: installation and design lessons for engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on Geoengineer.org – News
30 Second Briefing
Chance Instant Foundations marks 50 years since Dayton Power and Light’s 1976 field trial of screw-type streetlight foundations using 8-inch helical anchors for 30'6" aluminium poles on a four-lane connector and 6-inch anchors for 23' poles in a residential plat. Crews, initially untrained, installed 16 foundations in 12 working hours, later averaging 17 minutes per site including adapter plate setup, drilling to ground level and removal. The hollow-shaft anchors doubled as cable-ways, were fully retrievable, eliminated concrete supply and curing delays, and gained Standards Committee approval for one- to five-pole installations where soil conditions allow.
Technical Brief
- Screw-type foundations were trialled by Dayton Power and Light in February 1976 as an “experimental project”.
- W.J. Fisher, Chairman of the Streetlight Committee, documented installation performance and operational advantages in Chance Tips.
Our Take
Among the 491 Infrastructure stories in our database, very few product-focused pieces track a single system like CHANCE Foundation Solutions over a 50‑year window, which signals that screw/instant foundations have moved from niche to quasi-standard practice in certain pole and light standard applications.
The documented 12‑hour installation of 16 foundations with 8‑inch anchors in the United States suggests that in congested urban corridors such as São Paulo, Cebu City or Southern California, similar systems can materially cut lane-closure durations compared with cast-in-place concrete bases, which is often the binding constraint rather than pure construction cost.
For smaller utilities and municipalities like those in Ohio or Wisconsin planning one‑to‑five pole installations, the combination of small-diameter anchors and short installation times in the CHANCE system is likely to be most attractive on brownfield or retrofit works where mobilisation and concrete over-ordering (e.g. paying for 3 cubic yards to use a fraction) dominate lifecycle costs.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
