The tide isn't weather.
It's gravity keeping
score.
Every 27.3 days the moon reaches perigee — its closest orbital point to Earth. When perigee aligns with a full or new moon, the ocean rises another 15 percent. Those are king tides. And when they come, every crack, seam, and undermined footer on the Southeast Florida coast gets to speak.
A hundred and four
linear feet of coast
held in place by us.
Palm trees the client planted. Sunsets she watches from the pool deck. And a 104-linear-foot CBS bulkhead we are engineering back to its original elevation — cap, footer, rebar, drainage, and Sika chemistry, coordinated with the Engineer of Record. This isn't a stock render. This is what we do this week.
What holds
the finish.
A pathway
your neighbors
will notice.
Broom-finished cap. Level VII decorative option. Poly-turf inlay for the driveway match. Every meter of the coast that leaves our site has already been signed off by the Engineer of Record. What you see is only what the world sees. The other three-quarters is engineering that will still be there in fifty years.
The reason your seawall
is still standing.
A seawall is not a fence. It is holding back thousands of tons of soil, groundwater, and — during king tides — the entire mass of the Atlantic Ocean's high-tide plane pressing against a vertical concrete panel. Two systems make that possible: the tie-back that anchors the wall to the land, and the drainage field that lets the ground breathe.
Why tie-back matters.
Every seawall panel wants to fall forward into the water. What stops it is a tie-back rod — a galvanized steel bar drilled horizontally through the wall and anchored in a buried concrete dead-man block six to twelve feet inland. Without it, the wall is a diving board. With it, the wall is a leaf spring — flexing under load and returning to plumb every tidal cycle.
We check the tie-back condition on every inspection. When we find corrosion, wire break, or slack, the wall is on borrowed time — regardless of what the face looks like.
Why drainage matters more.
Rainwater and irrigation don't leave. They stack up behind the wall and press outward. A single foot of trapped groundwater adds 62 pounds of force per square foot to every panel. Over a 104-linear-foot wall, that is 25,000 pounds of hydrostatic pressure — every day, every tide.
The remedy is a subsurface drainage field: a 2-inch PVC drain in a #57 stone envelope, wrapped in non-woven geotextile, daylighted through the wall face at low tide. It relieves pressure. It buys the wall another fifty years. And it is invisible from the deck.
The three windows
that break seawalls.
Every failing seawall from Palm Beach to the Florida Keys shows its cracks during one of three astronomical windows. Below is the science — moon, tide, and precipitation — that determines when your seawall is under the most stress this season.