Posts tagged precast retaining wall
Flood Defences
Oct 20th
With around 7,760 miles of coastline and thousands of miles of inland waterways, the UK faces an ever increasing risk of flooding especially with the effects of global warming. England and Wales has over 24,000 miles in total of flood defences currently in place and the environment agency estimates it will be spending £270 million creating additional defences.
One of the most common materials for creating flood defences is concrete, which is better than steel and other products as it is weatherproof and won’t rust. Reinforced concrete blocks and precast concrete retaining walls are an excellent solution for constructing breakwaters and flood defence walls.
The government is also keen to preserve the aesthetics of our coastal land and is trying find and expand more environmentally friendly and natural flood defence systems. The main example of this is by utilising salt-marshes and mudflats which allows seawater to flood these flatland areas without effecting populated areas.
There are many types of structures and physical barriers that can be used for flood defence which include; river embankments, concrete retaining walls, sluice gates, breakwaters and weirs. One of the most famous and iconic flood defence units is the Thames Barrier in London, which is an adjustable flood barrier that can be quickly altered to protect London in case of a flood.
Retaining Wall
Sep 22nd
There are many applications and uses for retaining walls, and a variety of materials and structures that can be used to construct a retaining wall it all depends on the purpose of the structure and the loads that will be placed on it.
A concrete retaining wall could be as straight forward as using wooden railway sleepers to create raised flower beds in a garden, which will retaining a small earth load. At the other end of the scale you could have a precast concrete crib wall retaining an earth bank on a motorway cutting, either way the most important thing is selecting the correct product for the application for which it will be used.
The most common material for constructing a retaining wall is concrete, this can either be constructed onsite or ‘insitu’ using shuttering and is reinforced using steel bars and mesh, or it can be precast in a specialist precast concrete factory. The finished sections would then be delivered to site where they would be fixed to create a retaining wall.