PHASE   1

WORKER  SAFETY-STRUT  TEMPORARY  BRACING

 

Your tilting retaining wall has for decades been glacially creeping toward its now precarious position.  When its center of gravity moves beyond the outer-front edge of the footing, it will immediately collapse!  Just as a mountain-top snow avalanche can be set-off by a sonic boom, so can a sudden 'pan-caking' of a leaning concrete wall be triggered by a nearby trencher or even the vibrations of an 8 pound sledgehammer.  And when it does fall, any thing or any body within the wall's five ft. 'shadow' will be crushed!  So, don't gamble with your life on the stability of that benign-looking, but potentially lethal monolith.  

BASICS  OF THE 'TRENCH, TORQUE AND TIE'

PROCESS FOR SALVAGING TILTING, CRACKED & FAILING

CONRETE RETAINING WALLS

 

A preponderance of the aging concrete retaining walls of yesteryear were faultily designed and hastily built.  Decades of unrelenting earth pressure have glacially tilted and cracked these terrace-enabling monoliths into precariously leaning and failing positions.  A novel and simple process now enables the enterprising Do-It-Yourself homeowner to permanently repair, restore and lock into an upright position his huge on-sight liability.

The 'Trench Torque and Tie' method is entirely suitable for concrete wall of two feet to about five and one-half feet high.  The key to up-righting a wall is to relieve the earthen pressure behind the structure.  But the Ditch Witch and Case trenchers can excavate a 36" depth.  So for higher walls, a rubber-tired backhoe is required to excavate sufficiently deep to relieve the earth pressure, permitting the up-righting movement.  This factor renders it less D.I.Y. doable.  The job can still be accomplished, but at more cost; more time and complexity.

The 'TTT' process requires that the poured in place, reinforced concrete ground anchors be located behind and beyond the wall's backfill material and in solid and undisturbed earth.  It is these anchors that must provide the horizontal resistance to the earth pressure behind the wall.  It is this distance, from the wall rearward to solid earth, that determines the tension rod lengths.  So, the repair of failing walls located close to buildings are not amenable to our D.I.Y. method.

Four separate components combine herein to achieve this effective resurrection of an otherwise doomed monolith.  These factors are:

1.  The rental Ditch Witch or Case  rental trencher for the digging labor.

2.  An embedded, easy to construct, poured concrete ground anchor.

3.  A strong, 7-day bonding, poured concrete tension rod field splice.

4.  A simple mechanical means of transferring an immense pulling force  from the wall to the ground anchor; the thread-tipped 3/4" re-bar rod.  A 12" crescent wrench provides the 720 to 1 mechanical advantage to easily re-erect and lock the wall into its permanently vertical position.

The D.I.Y. hand mixes his own small batches of concrete in a wheel barrow for the ground anchors and field splices as he installs them.  This then, is the essence of the process. 

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