New Albany, Indiana, is nestled along the Ohio River across from the bustling city of Louisville, Kentucky. The Summit Spring hilltop offered a beautiful overlook on the city and promised to be a budding business breeding ground. In order to access the hilltop site, the existing West Daisy Lane Road would need to be extended to reach the proposed Summit Springs center development.
The city of New Albany was accustomed to facing challenging soil conditions. The need for five large retaining walls along the new roadway extension focused these concerns on the overall slope stability of the project. The first challenge was to identify a retaining wall system that could provide the range of solutions required for the project. That is when the engineers at Jacobi, Tooms, and Lanz, civil consultants to the city of New Albany, contacted Redi-Rock K.I.T. of Louisville, Kentucky to determine if the Redi-Rock retaining wall system could be designed to meet the challenges of the difficult site. Redi-Rock K.I.T. called JC Hines and Associates to provide geo-structural analysis and to prepare the retaining wall construction drawings.
In the end, the project required five walls. Three of the walls were designed as gravity structures that rely upon the mass of the large Redi-Rock blocks for stability. The remaining two walls were Redi-Rock Positive Connection walls that were designed as mechanically stabilized earth structures utilizing 12-inch wide strips of geogrid reinforcement to provide internal and external stability.
The final scope of retaining wall construction was 20,323 square feet with a maximum design height of 22.5 feet. The completed Redi-Rock precast retaining walls featured the attractive Ledgestone face texture in the custom Kentuckiana gray color.
Today, the new Daisy Lane twists and turns up the hill providing easy access to the Summit Springs development.