ORANGE BEACH, AL – Phillip West wasn’t sure what a dig at the edge of the Perdido Pass seawall would reveal. And after three holes were dug about six to eight feet deep, he’s still not sure what was learned.

“We found a lot of things but none of them real helpful to our project,” he said. “It doesn’t shoot us down for the project we just have to go about it a little different way. People will see, hopefully the same effect.”

That effect is a park-like area with a sandy approach to the wall and a wooden deck to accommodate handicap anglers, all with pretty landscaping.

Originally West and other officials thought digging deeper might be the solution. Scott Hardy of Burk-Kleinpeter Engineers has been hired by Orange Beach to study the findings and recommend a solution.

“We’re not going to dig as deep to backfill as we thought,” West said. “We’ll get the official report from the structural engineer later this week.

“What we initially saw was that the holes, if we dig as deep as we thought we’re going to be exposing what we put in to that tide action that’s coming into the expansion joints as well as the holes in the seawall.”

West said going that deep and back-filling could possibly be detrimental to the wall rather than a fix.

“We don’t want to expose our backfill to that action,” he said. “It would just remove it constantly. And we don’t want to really create an imbalance of pressure on the wall. If we dig down six to eight feet like we had originally planned that pressure from the pass side could be great enough to adversely affect the wall further.

“The last thing we want to do is more damage to the wall.”

A shallower dig may prove to be the solution, West said.

“We’re probably going to limit our excavation to a couple of feet and construct a pan-like deal with fabric and geogrid material to backfill this, and that way you’ll have a barrier between the old rubble,” he said. “We found an old section of asphalt parking lot that was about two feet lower than the existing one.

“There are good minds and good engineers working on it so I think we’ll get there.”

Officials are still looking for a blueprint of the original wall design and construction but haven’t been successful. West can’t even find if anyone knows when it was built.

“My best guess is they probably finished it about the same time they finished the bridge,” he said. “And they built Bird Island around 1969 and that’s when they emptied the coffer dams for the Perdido Pass project. I’m almost certain it was 40 years ago, regardless and may be close to 50.”