Levee Stabilization Technology:
High-Performance, Low-Cost Levee Strengthening
Solution for Floods and Earthquakes

Levee strength rehabilitation and raising levee height can provide a High ROI for property owners. An investment of under $2,000,000 per levee-mile can raise both current flood protection and earthquake protection from its currently vulnerable status. Protection by adding a preloaded concrete wall above the existing levee can resist both a Maximum Probable Flood and strong-motion Earthquake.

Delta islands or Delta frontage surrounded by levees and unprotected adjacent properties, your property can be protected about its entire perimeter from floods and earthquakes. Protected properties will soar in value due to reduced risks (and lower insurance premiums)! Alternate land use zoning due to reduced flood and earthquake risk, permit very high ROI’s for a deeply anchored and decorative floodwall investment.

Performance of levees during floods, snow-melt earthquakes and terrorist attack reduces risk for private industrial property, city water supplies and agriculture. Dire levee conditions currently exist in California, Florida, Louisiana, Middle America and thousands of River Deltas throughout the world.

Can all these potential disasters be prevented at your property tract? We believe they can, as shown graphically on the attached perspective views.

Prevention can be accomplished by retrofitting a vertically pre-stressed an earthen levee, concrete wall above. The concrete wall can be extruded up to 1-mile per day, as we’ve all seen done on freeway median-divider walls.

As shown on the Perspective Views, investment in this technology can be used to heighten existing levees by installing a strong anchoring system to simultaneously strengthen earthen soils against water forces and earthquake forces. Simultaneously limiting both subsidence and seepage as well as enhancing resistance to terrorism, are added technology benefits.

Deep anchors can be triple corrosion protected for longevity, with tensioning tendons preloaded at top of wall. Temporary preloading jacks on either side of each anchor would stress high strength steel tendons in tension, before placing permanent shims and reusing the jacks. This preload force will consolidate the earthen levee soil like a vertical concrete plunger. Scarified soil, mechanically disked and broom cleaned before placing concrete, creates sharp linear concrete cleats, locking deep into the soil when the wall is preloaded. These cleats add both shear strength and protection against seepage pressure, cutting sharply into the earthen levee soil.

Hence the earthen levee and the concrete wall become integrally preloaded to one another, resisting lateral forces. Earthen shear deformation is much stiffer and stronger than the passive soil pressures in New Orleans. As shown on the attached Perspective Views, anchoring technology can be failures used to strengthen existing levees by installing a strong vertical confining pressure internally. At no additional cost, this simultaneously strengthens levees to resist earthquakes, water pressure, soil subsidence, seepage and terrorist truck or boat attack.

Soil-structure interaction provides a vertically rigid preload until most subsidence is squeezed out and soil granules once separated by voids are engaged more closely to bear on one another. The result is a prestressed earthen and prestressed concrete monolith, transferring both hydrostatic and seismic shear forces under a vertically confining tri-axial compressive stress on all 3 sides.

Levee walls are vertically preloaded, utilizing the same devices we’ve all seen at building construction sites, restraining earthen walls vertically against the force of gravity. Rotated 90 degrees, this anchoring technology works far more reliably when assisted by the force of gravity. Reduced cost/time for excavation and spoil disposal as well as Roadway import.