Surcharge load on retaining wall

[Bammer25]

Another retaining wall question. I will attach a good sketch.

Anyway, fairly straight forward wall, but I have an indoor pool 1 foot away from the edge of wall. Entire area is filled with 57 stone.

I know I would take that pool surcharge at the roughly lower half of the wall (where it bears). I’m going to have a bust if I put it on the entire height.

Question is with it being 10 feet wide, how much would I place on the wall? Conservatively the entire mass of concrete and water, but if I want to sharpen the pencil a bit…I have duke plenty of concentrated loads but this has such a large footprint

Also, that 1 foot of stone in between the pool and wall, is that enough to consider my full height of retained backfill 10 feet? I don’t recall a minimum dimension as far as going back to have to add height if that makes sense.

 

[jdgengineer]

Why not just ignore the swimming pool and design as if it is retaining the full height? What happens if the pool is infilled later on? You'd be covered this way, otherwise I think you would likely have an overstressed retaining wall.

 

[canwesteng]

At those proportions I would treat it as a UDL for calculating surcharge. Best to do as jd suggests though.

 

[Bammer25]

That’s what I figured. The wall is already built. Not sure how they did it without an engineer seal. I was just trying to pass it For him. He is open minded to filling with geofoam, which is probably what I will recommend. It’s only 8” cmu but lots of rebar. Probably best I just not risk it

 

[ScratchyFilm]

Did he get it built then get in trouble with municipality afterwards for not having an engineer involved?

 

[Bammer25]

I don’t know if he got in trouble but surely he figured out he needed the paperwork eventually for inspections