ENR Reports that Pennsylvania Route 22/322 now has the longest MSE Wall in the U.S. and Canada, and the 2nd longest in the world. The project is located in Mifflin County, Pa. and involves adding an additional 2 lanes in a bifurcated alignment to supplement the existing 2 lanes in a dangerous stretch of roadway known as “Lewiston Narrows,†between the Juniata River and Shade Mountain. The project also involves approximately 9,000 micropiles, 8,280 linear ft of shoreline retaining walls (nine), and approximately 40,000 ft of H-piles were driven for the retaining wall and for two bridges. (Photo by the Reinforced Earth Company)
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MSEW and ReSSA Updates
ADAMA Software has released update 10.1 for their Mechanically Stabilized Earth retaining wall design software, MSEW 3.0 as of September 29, 2009. Click through for the download link and a few of the changes.
I expect that when the new FHWA MSE Wall Manual hits the street in a few months time that we will see some significant updates with the MSEW software package.
Geosynthetic reinforced soil walls as integral bridge abutments
ReSSA Major Update and MSEW Update
The downloads page at ADAMA Engineering lists an update (Number 1) for ReSSA 3.0. I have not even heard anything about the release of version 3.0, and even other pages on their website only mention ReSSA 2.0 as the latest version. As soon as I hear anything about the new version and its additional features, I’ll be sure to post the info here. ReSSA is software for the design of reinforced soil slopes or RSS.
An update for the MSE wall design software MSEW was also released recently. This update is number 8.1 and primarily updates the way reinforcement database files are referenced, allowing the location of the database file currently in use to be stored in the project file. After recently completing a major MSE wall review using MSEW, all I can say is halleluia! I had to manually locate the database file for every single one of my old runs. This should be a nice fix.