Fargo sits on the bed of the ancient glacial Lake Agassiz, and that means one thing for retaining wall design: deep, expansive clays that heave with the seasons. The Sheyenne River cuts through town, leaving behind terraces of silty clay and pockets of fine sand that complicate lateral earth pressure calculations. Here, the frost line reaches 60 inches, so any wall shorter than that still needs serious attention to backfill drainage and base stability. We approach retaining wall design with a combined geotechnical and structural lens, pairing soil borings with slope stability analysis when walls exceed six feet or sit near property lines, because in Fargo’s lacustrine clays, a poorly drained wall fails fast.
In Fargo’s lake clays, retaining wall performance hinges on drainage design and accurate drained shear strength parameters.
