Client: Rhondda Cynon Taff Borough Council
Main Contractor: Spectrum Construction Services
Project Value: £92,000
Date Completed: October 2022
The wall shown in the below picture which runs along the pavement of Llantrisant high street had shown signs of movement and cracking over time due to the pressure being put on the wall from above. A solution was required to strengthen the wall to enable works to be done on the land above the wall and to ensure everybody’s safety on the road and pavement below.
It was found that the best solution to strengthen the wall was to use driven Earth anchors. So the first thing that had to be done by the CFB team was to carry out an initial assessment of the ground behind the wall to see which anchors would be suitable for this job. So the
team installed 4 test anchors on top of the wall to gather data to send to Platipus Anchors Limited to decide which anchors would be best suited to this job.
After all of the data from the test anchors was gathered it was sent away to Platipus for them to carry out a design of how these anchors were going to be installed. Once the design was sent over to CFB they got started with carrying out the works. To stabilise the wall it was going to require 72 S8 Earth anchors installed to 5m deep as well as 12 Plati-drains driven into 3m deep across a 24m stretch of Llantrisant High street. The way that these anchors were going to be installed was with a 5 ton excavator as you can see in the picture above this still proved tough due to some of the rock found behind the wall but CFB managed to install all of the anchors to the required depth and then began tensioning them. We found that in the middle of the wall we needed to spread the load of the anchors more to ensure the stability of the wall which is why you can see on the photo to the right of this text some slightly larger plates in the middle. The team then tensioned all 72 anchors up to 35kn then locked them off at that working load. To finish the team chopped off any loose bar and put the caps on and filled the edges of the plates with mortar to give them the nice finish seen in the photos.
