Retaining Walls

I once pulled apart a section of wall in Ngaio where the buried poles had gone soft and spongy within six years, while the above-ground rails on the same structure looked fine. The timber had come from the same yard, the same job, probably the same delivery. The difference was the treatment level stamped on […]

The wall was 2011. The subsoil pipe behind it was never connected to anything, just left coiled near the footing where the installer must have run out of time or forgetting to finish it off, and it sat there for fourteen years doing nothing. Then Brooklyn got its 80 millimetre weekend, the kind of rain

A client in Hamilton East once showed me a fence line that had dropped 140 millimetres at one end over nine years, while the other end, six metres away, had barely moved. Same fence, same age, same timber. The difference was underneath: one post sat on firm river terrace clay, the other sat over a

The wall I get called back to most often in Karori is the same one, more or less, on a different street. Someone built it eight or ten years ago in a weekend, out of treated pine sleepers stacked on end, no drainage behind it, no engineer anywhere near the job. It held for a