A steel sheet-pile wall fourteen miles long was an amazing achievement of load-bearing mechanics, but to Giles Croft, an un-armored cofferdam was merely an invitation to disaster.
“The steel holds the water,” Giles explained to Master Duncan Stone-Splitter, as they stood on the crest of Cell Thirty-Two with a five-foot wooden scale model of the barrier.
“But the steel can’t absorb the nonstop moving impact of twenty-foot storm rollers for three months without metal fatigue.
Every time an ocean swell slams into the Larssen webs, it induces cyclic alternating bending stresses.
In sixty days, the steel clutches will develop micro-cracks at the root of the thumb.”
Duncan Stone-Splitter spat a stream of dark tobacco juice over the outer rail. He watched an Atlantic swell shatter against the steel skin below.
“So we give the iron a stone overcoat, my lord.”
“A two-sided gravity stone retaining wall,” Giles said. He pointed to the sloped profile of the model.
