The far-reaching impacts of the 1927 Mississippi River flood and the 1937 Ohio River flood led to an unprecedented effort to construct urban levee systems along these major waterways. In many cases more limited rights-of-way within cities prohibited the construction of wide earthen levees along the proposed protection alignment. In these restricted areas it was more economic to construct concrete floodwalls. To develop optimum designs for floodwalls, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) conducted a limited series of full-scale floodwall load tests in the late 1930's and 1940's for I-Walls in Paducah, KY and Tell City, IN, respectively and a more extensive series of full-scale T-Wall load tests in Cincinnati, OH between 1949 and 1955. The results of these tests led to the publication of USACE Engineering Manual EM 1110-2-2501 in 1961, and general design standards for urban flood protection systems in over 20 cities along the Ohio River valley, as well as for many other urban levee projects throughout the U.S. Since many of the major floodwall projects were either already completed or were in the process of construction by the time the Cincinnati T-Wall testing was finished, many of the T-Walls recently completed in various cities were subsequently modified to address important findings from the full-scale tests. The passage of time has led to these enormously important full-scale test programs being largely forgotten. This presentation will attempt to rectify this by showing historic photographs and test result plots, and by describing many of the basic assumptions underlying each of these tests. Further it will highlight some of the challenges faced by the engineers of the day as they attempted to apply lessons learned to an ongoing major national construction effort.
