Segmental Retaining Wall Construction Time

A new contractor, homeowner or estimator may want to know how long it takes to construct a segmental block retaining wall. This answer depends on multiple factors including:

Site conditions

Site access

Wall layout (curves, bends, and obstructions)

Soil types (clayey soils may be more difficult to work with)

Contractor experience

Size of contractor crew

Equipment available

This is the general rule of thumb

100 sq ft per man per day

500 sq ft per crew per day

The base course will take the longest, assume

25 sq ft per man per day

Reasons for a Retaining Wall

A retaining wall is generally used to create level surfaces. This is especially useful as level land is increasingly harder to come by in established communities. All remaining undeveloped parcels usually contain steep slopes or development has come up against hilly or mountainous terrain at the outskirts of towns.

Other more specific reasons include:

Homeowners attempting to create a level space for a patio or backyard that is currently too steep require a retaining wall.

Cities, Counties and State DOT widening road or constructing highway interchanges.

A developer needs a level surface for a parking lot and/or building pad.

Private mining companies creating a truck dump pad for a crusher.

There are generally 2 types of walls, cut and fill walls. There are a multiple kinds of retaining walls including gravity, embedded walls, and tie-back walls. MSE walls are tie back walls and generally easier to construct as fill walls. Cut (cutting into the existing ground) walls require excavation for soil reinforcement. Due to the possible high cost of excavation or property line limitations a different kind of wall may need to be considered in a cut wall situation.

The first MSE wall

A wall utilizing closely spaced strips or layers of soil reinforcement within a granular backfill connected to a manufactured facing (usually concrete panels or segmental blocks) is called a "Mechanically Stabilized Earth" wall. The MSE wall was patented by French architect and engineer Henri Vidal in 1963. He created the Reinforced Earth Company and constructed the first MSE wall in 1971 for Caltrans at the Angeles National Forest. The retaining wall corrected a major landslide.

The wall is still standing, a testament to the viability of the MSE wall. The RECO wall became popular among highway departments, used a lot of times for highway approach walls to highway bridge abutments. The RECO walls were faced with 6" thick steel reinforced concrete panels with steel reinforcing strips.

Today RECO walls are generically called panel walls and there are more manufacturers. Additionally, HDPE or polyester soil reinforcement has been used to create taller segmental block retaining walls far exceeding the gravity wall height originally conceived for the products.

My First Blog

This blog will be all about retaining walls. I am a civil engineer in the retaining wall industry. I work mainly on segmental block walls. A majority of the posts will be about these type of walls but I intend to include other blog posts related to different wall types, foundation design and geotechnical engineering.

I will try to include typical details when I can to support the posts. This blog is for information only for other civil engineers and anyone else that has retaining wall questions they need help with.