_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ *Corresponding author: E-mail: gmtetteh@umat.edu.gh; Advances in Research 8(2): 1-7, 2016; Article no.AIR.30096 ISSN: 2348-0394, NLM ID: 101666096 SCIENCEDOMAIN international www.sciencedomain.org Foundation Soil Characterisation for a Building with Multiple Cracks at Tarkwa, Ghana George M. Tetteh 1* , Festus A. Mensah 2 and Bernard Ofosu 2 1 University of Mines and Technology, P.O.Box 237, Tarkwa, Ghana. 2 Building and Road Research Institute, CSIR, Kumasi, Ghana. Authors’ contributions This work was carried out in collaboration between all authors. Author GMT designed the study, managed the literature and wrote the first draft of the manuscript and effected most of the corrections after the review. Authors FAM and BO did the field sampling, laboratory analyses and statistical plots. Authors FAM and BO organized the manuscript to journal format with guidance from author GMT and revised the plots after the review. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. Article Information DOI: 10.9734/AIR/2016/30096 Editor(s): (1) Enedir Ghisi, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Department of Civil Engineering, Florianópolis-SC, Brazil. Reviewers: (1) Laura Moretti, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. (2) Danial Moazami, University Putra Malaysia, Malaysia. (3) Sofia Mavridou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Complete Peer review History: http://www.sciencedomain.org/review-history/17213 Received 17 th October 2016 Accepted 8 th December 2016 Published 12 th December 2016 ABSTRACT Formation of cracks on buildings could be attributed to many factors such as properties of soils, geology, structural defects and climatic conditions. A public building at Tarkwa in the Western Region of Ghana developed cracks that rendered it unsafe and so it was demolished for a new structure to be put in place. Geotechnical investigations were undertaken to ascertain possible contributions of the foundation soils to development of these cracks before it was demolished. Site investigations on test holes and laboratory analyses showed that, the foundation soils were mainly dense silty sand, with average moisture content of 8.9% and specific gravity of 2.7 Kg/m 3 . These characteristics are typical of quartz sands. Though the soil at the site where the building was situated was non-plastic, plasticity index (PI) for soils at neighbouring sites ranged from 1.5% to 7.8% at an average of 4.9% and so consolidation immediately after structural loading was negligible and might not result in differential settling. Moisture content was lower than liquid limit as liquidity indices were between -0.326 to -12.653. These soils exhibited minimal liquefaction Original Research Article