The Grid That Doubles the Strength of the Ground
24th August 2026
Grady at Practical Engineering lays out how the Port of Long Beach solved a problem.
The Port of Long Beach in Southern California is the second-busiest container seaport in the United States, a major gateway for goods flowing to and from the west coast. Together with its next door neighbor, the Port of Los Angeles, roughly half a TRILLION dollars worth of trade moves through the port every year. To keep up with the staggering growth of shipping demand, the port is in a nearly constant state of improvement and expansion.
In the early 2000s, Long Beach was expanding the container storage yard at the Pier T Marine Terminal, but engineers hit a problem. The area they were expanding into was an old, disused dry dock, much lower than the rest of the yard. They were going to need a lot of fill to bring it up. There aren’t many more difficult paving challenges than a container terminal. You have constant heavy traffic of cranes, forklifts, and yard trucks, and the local fill materials that are available are junk: soft, water-logged silt scraped from the bottom of the ocean that has the structural integrity of a cake in the rain.
Traditionally, you would have to dig out all the muck, then haul in a literal mountain of expensive backfill, a process that would cost millions of dollars and take years. Instead, the engineers turned to a solution that looks more like a giant plastic accordion than a structural foundation. This 3D network did more than just hold the soil in place; it physically transformed those mushy dredged spoils into a high-capacity platform capable of supporting 100-ton machines and rows and rows of heavy container stacks.
The prefix “geo” gets a lot of work in the world of engineering. Just tack it on something semi-technical-sounding, and there’s a good chance there’s a product out there. Geotextile, geogrid, geofoam, and more. Today I want to show you how geocells work, and of course I built a little model in the garage so you can see it in action. I’m Grady and this is Practical Engineering.