How we rebuild a Failed Retaining wall WITHOUT adding new retaining walls 4 k video

Oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right you guys we got a doozy of a job today we're going out to a site where there's a retaining wall that suffered a catastrophic failure and it's threatening to take the wall above it out and the house along with it it's on an extremely steep slope when I look at a job like this I try to think outside of the box a lot of times when a contractor comes into something like this they'll may make a suggestion of just to repair and replace the damaged area as it's currently designed I like to try to come up with multiple options for the customer and today we're actually going to be going with one of the ulterior options instead of replacing this retaining wall the way it is we're going to eliminate it and what that's going to do is cut the budget down dramatically our plan today is to remove the damaged section to leave the rest of the retaining wall in place that's still standing to peel the top course off and then to recreate a brand new slope over the retaining wall we're going to actually bury the retaining wall and then put the new slope up to the bottom of the existing wall one of the big questions is can you bury a retaining wall and when it rots is that going to settle and the answer is yes and no you can definitely bury a retaining wall and it actually encapsulate s' the wall and keeps it from settling as quickly as if it was exposed to the elements now it will still decompose and as it's decomposing you're gonna get a little bit of settlement the real challenge on a job like this is not if it will work it's how do you get there to make it work we have an existing retaining wall that's in okay shape not awesome shape but okay shape and we've got to drive over it so the first step is to build a wall over the existing retaining wall to do that we're gonna put filter fabric over this Boulder wall and then drive right over it for 90 percent of the job then when we're done we're gonna remove all of that and reexpose that upper retaining [Music] here comes the boom now this is an extremely dangerous job I know we're gonna get a bunch of critics that are sitting in their underwear eating their Cheetos with their little orange fingers typing on their keyboards going oh that's not so bad I've done something twice as steep as that well the fact of the matter is you're not going to be able to see just how dangerous these slopes are in the video but if you're a contractor and you're going to attempt to do something like that make sure you have the right equipment in fact I'm gonna go so far as to say this job would have not been possible with any one of our other tracked skid loaders this job is a testimonial to the ability of this ASB to hug the slope it actually performed better than we ever expected it to thank goodness because otherwise we would have been in big trouble now if you're a homeowner and you're hiring a contractor to do this job make sure you get a copy of their insurance and I say that not being facetious I mean this job is dangerous enough that if something happens on your property sure that that contractor is covered and doesn't come after you are going to need to compact to make this job work but you're not going to be able to really bring in an external compactor they just don't work on steep slopes like this so what you're going to end up doing is using the weight of the machine and putting in smaller lips this is going to actually take you longer to do this job site but if you don't do it this way you could suffer failure years later down the road so this is an important step of the process even though it takes a lot longer to do it this way well it only took two days but we finally made it to the bottom [Music] [Applause] [Music] this whole ramp that's that's eight dump trucks full of dirt right there two and a half days may seem like a long time just to get to the bottom of the slope but every single bucket of dirt that comes in has to be compacted to make this project a success we could just dump it all in but what would happen is that slope would cave away not right away but in one two three four five years down the road this customer would have problems what we're doing is we're marrying that soil into the existing bank to make sure that we the slope that we're building doesn't go anywhere ever now you're gonna see us actually bringing out a tape measure and measuring the slope because we're not creating a random slope we know that we've got to hit two point five to one at our steepest ratio a two point five will allow this backyard to easily establish vegetation without having a whole bunch of erosion or runoff problems before that vegetation can be established so we have a benchmark and we've got to hit it [Music] [Applause] [Music] until we can get vegetation to establish over this slope we've got to maintain a silt fence at the bottom what you don't get to see in this video is just below this hill there is a drop-off and then a hill direct a house directly beneath it if this machine goes topsy-turvy down the slope it'll land in somebody's living room down at the bottom of this cliff try to catch me howl Anatomy no if you look closely you'll see that the timber retaining wall that was there is starting to slowly disappear and the idea is you will never see it it's going to stay buried underground but it's helping stitch the entire slope together as soon as we remove that timber retaining wall we've loosened up the soil and made a dangerous site even more dangerous until we could get it back together so by leaving it in place we've given ourselves a little bit of additional insurance now this plan was actually approved by the city and a civil engineer so we didn't just come up with this and shoot from the hip point well we think this will work no we know that this plan will work of course it's gotta rain when we're working on one of the most challenging sites we've faced in a while and what you see Tim doing right now is he's slowly working his way down to the bottom of the site and he's trying not to roll that skid loader over the edge silence I want to take a wild guess that his cheeks are clenched pretty tight to that seat right now because there is a steep hill and then a lip at the bottom with that house and we don't want to go visit those neighbors below us [Music] the side of the ramp essentially washed out so we've got to redo the bottom also / when the armchair experts start commenting we did tarp all that off so everything on the hill all that down there was tarp too so for that no problems doing on this nasty the thing is a billy goat alright guys that's all we got for you today on the next video we are going to be concluding this job but we're also gonna be taking a look at a brand new bucket that we just picked up from CMP attachments it's got a power rake built right into the back of it and we're going to show you how this works on this jobsite it was a game changer but we're also going to be wrapping up this project and sharing with you all of the details of what we did how much soil we brought in how we completed this project so that's coming at you in the very next video in this series now do me a favor you guys and hit that subscribe button to make sure you stick around because we are coming right back to this jobsite and then the very next video and while you're here check out the two videos I'm going to pop up on the screen for you right now god bless you guys and go get them