Boulder Walls Design and Construction in Palestine

Mohammad T. Alsayyed, PhD, PE, Geotechnical Engineer

International Center for Geotechnical & Engineering Studies, Bethlehem, Palestine

ABSTRACT
In the last twenty years, the use of boulder walls as a type of gravity retaining wall becomes
more public in construction projects. The boulder wall or rockery wall varies in height from 1
meter to about 20 meters. This type of work, usually has no specifications in any of the contacts
and it has no real structural analysis and design. The task of construction this type of wall is
usually converted to a subcontractor whose qualification are to have crawler loader and a source
for boulders. Usually this subcontractor is working the installation of the boulders the way it
comes. No special requirements and if there are any requirements by the engineer they are just
decided during the building process. No calculation notes, no specific designs or detailed
drawings, and also there is no equilibrium studies for the different failure modes. Lately, some
cases were failed during construction or after construction. Investigations of some of these
cases, showed that the problem is not due to weakness in the material itself, but due to no design.
The boulder walls are, unfortunately, under estimated by most of the engineers. They think that
these types of wall are better known by the subcontractors who are in most of the cases not
engineers and sometimes completely illiterate.
This paper addresses the methodology of dealing with this type of retaining walls and how the
analysis and construction are to be dealt with. National and international codes of practice are
shown and how they were implemented and what are the deficiencies that arose.