Workers build a retaining wall on Vulcan Avenue in Encinitas on …

North County Times – Escondido,CA,USA
ENCINITAS — That heavy construction on Vulcan Avenue during the
last six weeks is intended to keep condominiums from crashing onto the busy
road. …

ENCINITAS — That heavy construction on Vulcan Avenue during the last six weeks is intended to keep condominiums from crashing onto the busy road. View A Video

Just opposite the Encinitas Commuter Station and between Encinitas Boulevard and City Hall, workers toiled Friday to prepare a 365-foot-long retaining wall for another application of concrete.

Since the job began last month, a block-long segment of sidewalk on the east side of Vulcan has been closed, and during work hours, crews have closed one of two northbound traffic lanes.

A foreman from Kearny Mesa-based Groundforce Construction said Friday that when the wall is finished later this month, it will be up to 15 inches thick, with multiple layers of reinforcing steel.

Anchoring the concrete and steel to the fragile cliff behind it are 20-foot-long “soil nails,” 250 of them.

“Supervisors like to call it overkill,” foreman Daniel Smith said Friday at the bustling job site. “Engineers like to call it fail-safe.”

On Tuesday, he said, workers will begin pumping beige-colored concrete onto the wall face, which undulates gently along its length. Workers will tool and sculpt the concrete so it mimics the appearance of a real, sandstone bluff.

During the heavy rains of 2005, sections of the slope began to fail and some residents from the 99-unit Hacienda de la Playa condominium complex urged city officials to take action.

Additional failures since then have threatened the safety of residents above and pedestrians below; on March 30, the city granted the homeowners association an emergency permit to proceed with construction, said assistant engineer Stephanie Kellar.

In places, the sheer bluff came within 10 feet of homes.

“It was getting too close for comfort,” Kellar said.

Kellar said residents of the complex are assessing themselves to pay for the project, although she did not know its cost.

The resident representing homeowners, Curtis Scott Englehorn, said Friday he was “not prepared” to disclose the job’s cost information.

Smith, the contractor, said he did not know what the wall would cost but that others like it have exceeded $1 million.

As Smith talked to a reporter, workers buzzed around him.

They cut reinforcing steel with a gas-powered saw. They fastened sections of mesh together with bailing wire.

An excavator scooped bucket after bucket of loamy dirt into idling dump trucks. A mechanical lift hoisted workers high up the bluff face, where they nailed specialized fabric to the slope.

The honeycomblike fabric, with absorbent felt on one side and impermeable plastic on the other, is designed to draw groundwater into drain pipes at the base of the wall.

Smith said the “tie-back wall” would be the first of its kind in Encinitas and that it would be landscaped with drought-resistant plants at its base.