The Saladillo stream serves as a physical boundary, separating the city of Rosario from Villa Gobernador Galvez in Santa Fe, Argentina. It has a plain topography with geological and hydraulic conditions that result in complex processes of non-stabilized regressive erosion with block fall, giving rise in its final stretch towards the Paraná River to the so-called Cascada del Saladillo (Saladillo Falls).
This is a natural horseshoe-shaped waterfall that has a height of ~15 m and a width of 64 m at the base, composed of silts and clays over-consolidated with natural calcareous cementation on a thick layer of dense to very dense sands. To stop the receding process of the waterfall and prevent the destruction of a major road bridge with infrastructure services, a retaining structure was initially designed using diaphragm walls in combination with jet grouting and was subsequently updated to a retaining wall linked by beams to diaphragm wall modules to meet the project schedule.
This paper describes the tender project for the initial solution and the geotechnical campaign carried out; moreover, it presents details of the updated the technical solution including the geotechnical-structural FEM2D and FEM3D analyses carried out for the design of an atypical structure with few records available worldwide.
