State of the Practice: Past, Current, and Future Perspectives of Reinforced Soil Retaining Structures in Turkey - Reinforced Soil Engineering: Advances in Research and Practice - page 150

percent of the Web-Soil walls constructed within this project had heights less
than 5m. Fifty percent of the walls were between 5 to 10 m high, constituting the
majority. The remaining 40% were higher than 10 m.
3 REINFORCED EARTH WALLS
The reinforced earth technology was used most extensively in Turkey in the late
1980s. A list of the projects is summarized in Table 1. Most of the projects were
retaining walls built for the Turkish Highway Administration. However, two
municipalities started using this technology. The largest city in Turkey, Istanbul,
and the second largest city and the capital of the country, Ankara, have both
ordered several reinforced earth walls. The majority of these walls are between 5
to 10 m high. As shown in Fig. 2, the maximum wall height constructed is 23m
and consists of two levels with a small berm in between. Another wall, 18m high,
is seen in Fig. 3 . Again, the majority of the walls are constructed as retaining
structures or side wings of approach embankments. Where they are used to
support side wings of embankments, usually the bridge itself sits on a reinforced
concrete structure. However, more recently for some of the cases the reinforced
wall was also used as the bridge abutment, as shown in Fig. 4.
Figure 2 A two-step 23-m-height reinforced earth wall (Izmir-Cesme Highway).