GSET designed a soil nail wall system to retain Shamokin Creek for a state-sponsored flood protection project under Route 61 bridge abutment.  After the wall was installed, a decision was made to house a 600-ton Monitowoc Crane over the road.

Since the soil nail wall was designed as a passive system, the soils nail wall system was evaluated for the proposed crane reactions anticipated during installation of the 27 precast box culvert sections.   GSET subsequently installed inclinometers within the failure plane of the wall to observe any movement as a result of the work.   This work occurred over a 3 day period.  Verification load tests were conducted to failure or, as a minimum, to a test load that includes the design bond strength and pullout factor of safety of 2.0.  Proof tests were performed on approximately 5% of the total number of soil nails installed.

Overall stability was analyzed using NAVFAC DM7’s wedge method.