Synthesize Causes of Failure: Surcharge and Hydrostatic Pressure

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