Retaining Wall Design

Massachusetts State laws require that any retaining wall over four feet in height must be designed by a Licensed Professional Engineer.  How often have you seen a retaining wall leaning, or badly cracked, or about to fall down?  They most likely were built by someone who did not know how to design and build retaining walls.

Why would you spend thousands of dollars building a retaining wall only to have it fall down in a few years?  When you go to sell your property the potential buyer will most likely have an engineer inspect any existing retaining walls on your property.  If the inspector sees that they are leaning or deteriorating, he will report it to your buyer and your sale price will most likely be reduced by the projected cost of the replacement retaining wall.

There are many types of retaining walls, and some types are better than others, depending on the situation.  You can have block walls, boulder walls, concrete walls, interlocking metal walls, timber walls,  and steel reinforced, concrete walls.

In order to design your wall we will need the correct topography, location, height, underlying soil strength, and the proposed loads adjacent to your wall, on the high side of the wall.  Will the wall be holding up a swimming pool, a road or a building?  All of these have different design loads and require different strength walls.

There are many ways to make the retaining wall appealing to the viewer.  Walls can be built with decorative blocks, and they can be built with concrete and have a decorative block face added to the outside of the wall.

At Land Planning Incorporated we have designed walls six feet high and twenty feet long, and we have designed walls thirty feet high and over one hundred feet long.  We have the software required to design walls and our engineers have had the experience.   Do not make the mistake of trusting your contractor to design the wall when he says, “no problem, I can handle it.”

Also, be sure to ask your engineer to show you his Professional Engineers License and his identification.   You would not hire a pretending surgeon to perform surgery on you.  Why would you hire a pretend engineer?