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'Cutting corners everywhere': Engineers say parts of Trump’s wall will collapse months after it was built
A new engineering report set to be filed in federal court has said that Republican President Donald Trump’s privately constructed 3-mile border fence, built in 2020 by North Dakota-based Fisher Sand and Gravel, will fall down due to extensive erosion in a matter of months if it’s not fixed and maintained.
The wall was built by the nonprofit “We Build the Wall”, a group that’s currently under federal investigation for illegally spending most of the $25 million it raised to help President Donald Trump build a wall along the U.S./Mexico border.
Fisher Sand and Gravel company president Tommy Fisher, a regular Fox News guest, had called his company’s fence the “Lamborghini” of border walls. However, Alex Mayer, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at El Paso told the Texas Tribune. “It’s not a Lamborghini, it’s a $500 used car…. It seems like they are cutting corners everywhere.”
Mark Tompkins, an environmental engineer hired by the National Butterfly Center wildlife refuge to examine the wall for a lawsuit alleging that Trump’s wall is destroying the local ecology, said that heavy rains, flooding, and erosion common to the Rio Grande Valley — where the wall is located — will likely cause it to tumble in a matter of months.
“When extreme flow events, laden with sediment and debris, completely undermine the foundation of the fence and create a flow path under the fence or cause a segment of the fence to topple into the river, unpredictable and damaging hydraulics will occur,” Tompkins wrote in a court affidavit.
A second report by the Millennium Engineers Group found that “gaps up to three feet wide and waist-deep, concrete cracking, construction flaws” caused by “substandard construction material” will cause the wall to fall soon as well.
Fisher has said that the reports’ findings are normal post-construction issues. The Trump Administration has given Fisher’s firms $2 billion in federal contracts to build more border wall segments.
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