QKR Selects Maccaferri Africa to Construct Retaining Wall at Navachab Gold Mine, Namibia

When QKR required a retaining wall for their Navachab open-pit gold mine in Namibia, the mine operator chose Maccaferri Africa to develop a cost-effective and flexible geogrid-reinforced MSE wall.

QKR needed a new loading station constructed with an 8.5m-high tip wall. We used on-site Kalahari sand as backfill by using our MacRes® system for vertical concrete faced reinforced soil structures.

We built a tip wall with a 8.5m-high main wall with two wing walls with different heights, creating a total facia area of approximately 310m². The structure needed to resist high loads, including a jockey slab exerting a dead load of 15kPa and haul trucks equivalent to a load of 25kPa.

Ultra-tough and high-strength structures

We proposed our MacRes® system for this project.

MacRes is a soil reinforcement solution that incorporates our ultra-tough and high-strength ParaWeb® geogrids to deliver vertical concrete-faced structures that can accommodate heavy loads from haul trucks.

Our reinforced soil structures are cost-effective, flexible and quick to construct. They also enable us to reuse on-site materials as structural backfill for the walls, saving costs and time.

We used local Kalahari sand for backfill to meet the design requirements by using our high-performance ParaWeb® 50 and 75 geogrids with a maximum tail length of 7m.

Maccaferri Africa supplied training services to Rocla Pipes, which was responsible for precasting the concrete panels to form the wall’s face. With a minimal concrete strength of 45MPa, the panels were cast in Windhoek, Namibia, and delivered to the site.

Construction began in mid-September 2017 and was completed at the end of November of the same year.