A border wall: there’s not just one way to build it
Eight prototypes unveiled for proposed wall across southern states’ border
SAN DIEGO — They all stand neatly in a row: eight large panels on a barren dirt patch just a few hundred yards from the San Diego border with Mexico. Unveiled in late October, these are the prototypes for the border wall President Donald Trump has vowed to erect on the southern border. Later this year, the federal government will test the panels for strength and effectiveness.
These prototypes make clear that a border wall is not simple: It can vary considerably in material, shape and cost. And while it is far from clear that Congress will pay for a wall or that any of these designs will be built at wider scale, they are reallife renderings of a promise that fueled much of Trump’s campaign.
Six contractors have made bids on the wall, and the specific details of their plans are not public. But they allowed us to visit the prototypes, and we asked border security experts and engineers what they saw in each design and what challenges each wall may face.
Every expert agreed on one thing: Finding a design that would work for the entire length of the border would be extremely hard, if not impossible. And many caution that such a wall may never happen.
The prototypes present the government with a number of choices:
Concrete or no concrete?
The prototypes include plain concrete walls and ones made of a combination of materials, what the government described as “other than concrete.” The term is intentionally vague, a signal to contractors to be creative and bring a design that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had not considered.
Any barrier must be able to withstand at least 30 minutes of force from a “sledgehammer, car jack, pickax, chisel, battery-operated impact tools, battery-operated cutting tools, oxy/acetylene torch or other similar hand-held tools,” according to the instructions for the prototypes.
Some “other than concrete” prototypes incorporate steel, which can be relatively easy to cut with a torch, while pure concrete is not. A hollow steel pipe whose walls are half an inch thick could easily be cut in less than an hour, according to