Foundation repair in the Redlands

The defining condition here is slope. A great many Redlands homes sit on cut-and-fill building pads carved into a hillside, which means one side of the house bears on undisturbed native material and the other bears on engineered fill. Those two things settle at different rates and by different amounts, and differential settlement is what cracks a house. It is not a defect in how the pad was built; it is an inherent condition of building on a slope, and it is why so many hillside lots came with an engineered foundation requirement in the first place.

Mesa County maintains a list of foundation requirements applied subdivision by subdivision across more than 600 platted subdivisions in the county. Engineered foundations, open-excavation observation, site-specific soils reports and slope stabilisation reports all appear on that list, and hillside subdivisions are disproportionately represented among the ones carrying the heavier requirements. If you own a Redlands home, it is worth finding out what your subdivision was required to do, because it tells you what the ground was known to be doing when it was platted.

The second Redlands factor is drainage from above. Water coming off the slope behind a house reaches the uphill foundation wall as both surface flow and subsurface flow, and in a summer monsoon storm it arrives all at once. The National Weather Service office here puts the start of the monsoon around the second week of July, with most years finished by the end of August. Those few weeks deliver a disproportionate share of the year is worth of water in a handful of events.

Retaining structures matter here more than anywhere else in the valley. A retaining wall that has started to lean is holding back soil that will otherwise end up loading a foundation wall, and the two problems are usually best looked at together rather than separately.