Securing The Cuyahoga: The Combi-Wall That Holds Irishtown Bend
Nick Kloenne, Project Manager, Richard Goettle, Inc.; Cody Schappacher, Project Manager, Richard Goettle, Inc.
Summary
For decades the hillside at Irishtown Bend was one of the most unstable slopes on the Cuyahoga River. It was a slow moving landslide threatening the federal navigation channel that serves Cleveland's steel and bulk cargo industries. This presentation is a contractor's case study of the fix: 2,200 feet of rock-anchored combi-wall driven at the toe of the active slide. Cranes worked from a bench cut into the hillside to drive piles in the river while tieback anchors were drilled from barges inside a live shipping channel. Nick Kloenne and Cody Schappacher of Goettle walk through the project from bid to completion. The story runs from the site history through the installation itself: 107 ea. 60-inch and 96 ea. 54-inch pipe piles set from a custom floating template and 203 multi-strand tieback anchors drilled through the piles into bedrock as deep as 230 feet. The discussion also covers the dynamic load test program that eliminated the specified impact-driving requirement and the through-pile anchor detail that eliminated walers. It looks at the Restricted Navigational Area windows that shared the river with seven operations moving at once. The project logged more than 85,000 labor hours on an active landslide with zero recordable injuries.
What the presentation will cover:
• Marine operations: a floating pile template, barge fleet logistics, and a winter of ice-breaking
• Vibratory-only installation proven through dynamic load testing and adopted project-wide
• High-capacity tieback anchors drilled through the piles and load tested to 1,210 kips
• Sharing a live navigation channel: Restricted Navigational Area phases with the U.S. Coast Guard, the Port of Cleveland, and the Lake Carriers Association
• Safety and production on a challenging site
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