Retaining Walls & Slopes

A La Jolla client bought a hillside house in late summer, and the first big rain of the season took out the lower retaining wall in the backyard over one weekend. It did not crack. It rotated forward and dropped a slope’s worth of soil onto the neighbor’s patio below. His first two questions were […]

On a Point Loma job a couple of winters ago, the owners called because a crack had opened across their patio and the fence at the back of the yard had started leaning downhill. They thought the patio was the problem. The patio was just the first thing to show it. The whole back slope

If you show me two retaining walls, same height, same block, same soil, I can usually predict which one will still be standing plumb in ten years by looking at one thing you cannot see from the front: what is behind it. The face of a retaining wall is the part everyone judges and the

A retaining wall on our Oro Valley slope held for years and then failed in a single monsoon season, and when we dug into why, it came down to three desert-specific things working together: the caliche layer underneath, the punishing heat above, and the way monsoon rain arrives all at once. A retaining wall that

I manage a number of properties with retaining walls, and when one needs replacing the first question is always the same: segmental block or poured concrete? Owners tend to have an opinion based on looks, but the choice should come down to height, soil, drainage, and budget, because the two systems fail and succeed for

I built plenty of low garden walls over the years without an engineer anywhere in sight, and that was fine, they were holding back a foot of soil in a flower bed. But I also watched neighbors treat a real retaining wall like a garden wall, skip the permit and the design to save money,

When a retaining wall claim crosses my desk, the cause is almost never visible in the photos of the failed wall. It is in the parts nobody sees: the geogrid that was supposed to be buried in the soil behind the wall, and the backfill that was supposed to be clean gravel instead of the