Retaining Walls

Although most of the retaining walls that the average homeowner sees are used to hold back the earth, there are many uses for these walls including the slowing of the erosion of riverbanks. There’s more to building one than meets the eye, and a proper retaining wall will do it’s job for years to come, but one that’s not constructed properly can have the opposite effect of what its designed for.

One of the big reasons for a retaining wall comes when you live in a part of the country where the ground is not level. People who live around mountains and such are quite familiar with the need for these retaining walls. And this isn’t something new in construction that’s just come about with our modern times either. Retaining walls have been used for thousands of years and were even used in Roman times when they used this type of construction to build their roads.

Even the famous rice paddies of Asia and some of the great castles in Europe took advantage of this technology. Over their long history there have been four basic types of retaining walls that have come out of their long evolution. The first of these is called the Buttressed Retaining Wall and it’s named as such because the real supports come from the buttresses that are visible from the outside of the system. This is an incredibly strong way of building one of these since the only way for the entire wall to fall is for these buttresses to be smashed. This is the model that was used most often in the castles of Europe that are still standing today.

The Gravity Retaining Wall is all about stacking enough material so that it forces the material behind it to stay back. This is really the simplest kind of retaining wall and it is almost always thicker at the base than at the top—as these walls get taller they should get thinner as well and one of the biggest disadvantages here is that these walls require a lot of material to build properly.

The Cantilever Wall is the same thickness all the way through and these are generally affixed at a footing. Because these walls generally hold back a great mass of something, it’s generally a good idea to have these walls engineered by an expert who can make all the right calculations. The last option that you’ve got when it comes to retaining walls is the Counterfort Retaining Wall and this one has a triangular ‘wall’ built within the other outer wall to give it strength and support.

Regardless of the kind of retaining wall that you pick for the job that you’ve got a hand, you should always be careful to make sure that the one you select is the one that can do the job properly. As well, you should call in a professional when you aren’t sure of your own design.

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