Catastrophic Retaining Wall Failure Goes to Court in St.Paul MN

what you're going to see today is a catastrophic retaining wall failure I'm being called in as an outside expert to testify and give my professional opinion on why the retaining wall failed but before I get into what my opinion is I want you to take a good close look at what you see here what we have is uh an older railroad tie retaining wall an existing house a garage and then another house now in this case this isn't a very big wall but there's certain signs and indications of where the problem lies on something like this I'm going to take you with me we are going to analyze the site we're going to make a determination and then we're going to prepare the documents to go to court to give our opinion what I want you to look at is where the wall has failed and where the garage sits okay this is an important Point as you look at the garage what you're going to see is no gutters so that means every time it rains the water is shedding directly off and going right behind this retaining wall and it is clearly collapsed in this area I also want to bring you in a little bit closer and look at some of the other details that I want you to note I didn't hold the camera when we were making this video so don't flame me on that okay okay a few things that when you get called in to do a consultation you got to look at all the little things that will tell the bigger picture Okay in this case I want you to look at the dead men what you see here is you see these dead men which extend clearly underneath the driveway we have more over here which extend beneath the garage when you get called in to analyze a site like this it's important that you don't just jump in and reach to conclusions or reach to assumptions because one party is hiring you you really have to be objective about the whole situation you have to step back and you have to look at all the details of it and imagine that it doesn't matter who's hiring you or what side of the fence you're on so the question that you should be asking is what does that mean why is that even important well when you build a retaining wall a retaining wall is built under three conditions one is no load the second is a surcharge and the third is a a retaining wall that will be holding up a slope now in this case this was probably built and I say probably I wasn't here when it was built but it was probably built looking at the dead men that are in it to withstand just a flat grade at the top after the fact the garage came into Play and play placed a search charge onto the retaining wall now how can you say after the fact well you can't shove a dead man like this underneath the garage this had to already be in place and then the garage was built so what happened is you have an old retaining wall that's holding up fine but now all of a sudden it's got weight compressing the soil behind it and that's straining the wall straining the wall and then you get this entire roof load of water coming directly before this goes to court I'm going to come up with a couple of different solutions for both of these homeowners and let them decide what works best now a lot of people make the mistake of believing because there was a retaining wall here you've automatically got to put a retaining wall back what I'm going to show you is what I consider sometimes to be an even better solution I have grade rods set up and I want you to imagine that in this particular case what if we didn't build a retaining wall what if we simply just reestablish the grade now this is set up at a 2 to one slope roughly right here and it could be actually extended out and brought down so that the toe came to here and made it a 3 to one or a manageable slope if that had been done in the first place this retaining wall had never been built and they just simply had a nice gentle grade going down these guys and these guys wouldn't be going to court right now furthermore what I want to look at is opportunities to get the two parties together to be able to settle out a court simply because just redoing what was there isn't always the best answer for either party either side and furthermore there may be a better long-term solution that cost them less money so we're going to look at that as well and try to figure out where the problem lies how we could fix the problem and give them opportunities to settle outside of Court that's what you're going to hopefully see today we don't necessarily have to put this retaining wall back in place in this particular case if we reestablish the slope then what we do down here is we create a Swale a gentle sale not a ditch not an ankle twister but just the gentle swell and we funnel the water down to the street behind you so that the water doesn't come on to this guy's property this guy isn't flooding them out and talk about a cost savings we're talking about a difference of going from about a 17,000 $18,000 retaining wall repair and replacement to about a 10 no actually it's $1,900 is what I've calculated removing this wall creating the Swale removing the concrete going in in between the two garages creating a Swale in there and funneling it all down to the street we're talking about a $5,000 savings on this project Alone by thinking outside of the box and coming up with alternate means to make to create solutions for both of these homeowners I want you to also look the lack of gutters is going to shed this water right here the water's going to fall and a heavy rain it's going to Arch off from the top and land right here it's clear as about on a light rain the water's going to fall down back over here here and then go right to the retaining wall okay what's going to happen is you've got the weight of the structure plus hydrostatic pressure plus all the way of that water in these events that occur maybe once twice a week or whenever they happen hitting this wall which is going to lead to its premature failure look at this site one more time as we go down the wall is fine it's stable the weight of the garage isn't on the wall on the end of it and as we go down the other way and pan and look you can see that this wall has failed all through here because it's connected this is the big portion of it it's kind of like the domino effect the wall starts to fall and it takes more with it but then it separates it can stand there's no water no hydrostatic pressure coming off from a garage structure over here so it can withstand and it's able to maintain itself on its own so if I was going to give my professional opinion on what happened on a site like this it was clear that the retaining wall was in place this home was built then somebody came in put this Garage on top of an existing retaining wall which was not designed to have a search charge placed on it and then on top of that they allowed all the roof water from the garage to fall down and hit directly behind the retaining wall which led to its premature failure which led to it being blown out which led to this occurrence