Bricklaying and pointing quay walls

Many quay walls in the Benelux are historic masonry: brick or block work, often more than a century old, still carrying modern loads. Where the mortar has washed out, individual bricks work loose, the joint pattern opens and the fill behind the wall starts to migrate through the gaps. Left alone, a joint problem becomes a stability problem, because the wall relies on the fill staying where it is.

Our divers rake out degraded joints, clean the masonry, replace loose or missing bricks with matching units and repoint the wall with a mortar selected for underwater curing and compatibility with the original material. Work is carried out from a small pontoon or from the quay itself, in bays, so the visual line of the wall stays consistent and each finished bay can be checked before the next one starts.

Where the wash-out has already reached the fill, repointing alone is not enough. We first close the leak paths — grout injection or a geotextile filter behind the joints — and only then restore the face. That order matters: pointing a wall that is still losing fill behind it simply hides the mechanism for another season.