Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

This week has be punctuated by the ANZAC day public holiday on Thursday which essentially converted the week into a 3 dayer as it seems everybody managed to get their leave passes in for Friday to make it a good 4 day weekend. I am not entirely sure how and why they were all sanctioned by the powers that be but it left me with a site without a Site Manager or Supervisor for both Friday and Saturday meaning that team set deadlines were missed.

As previously expected, the slip-lane has assisted in the turmoil this week, and only exacerbated by crane breakdowns has meant that the delivery of the beam and bottom mat steel for Zone 5 was not delivered on Monday as directed but finally made its way to site on Wed evening, just in time to see the fixers waving goodbye for their long weekend. The steel supplier was unable to deliver on the Monday as the order was still incomplete due to an error on their part. The carnage (deliberate typo for Craneage), booked to move it from the slip-lane to zone in the evening of the Wed, broke down meaning that as the skeleton fixer crew returned to site on the Friday, the steel was only just making its way over. This obviously caused issues for the fixer contractor who blames JHG for all the delays and the cost of his manpower that was under used for the week.

The State (Clients Representative) issued notice on JHG on Wed afternoon in relation to quality issues they had found around site. As there were limited Non-Conformance Reports (NCR) filed in the system, the PM had a pretty hard time explaining why the situation was as it was. All South engineers were then called into a meeting with the PM and given a formal letter detailing how things must get better and questioned on why and how these issues happened. It smelled strongly of a blame issuing exercise but actually highlighted processes that I don’t think had been briefed to everyone, as a wise man once told me, “You don’t know what you don’t know”. The following day off for ANZAC day was welcomed.

ANZAC day started with a 0430 Dawn service in Kings Park overlooking the Swan River for sunrise, followed by a good breakfast in town with Nicky, Remi (Australian RE) and a few other Engrs prior to watching possibly one of the longest parades in history – the bands were running back to the start of the route as there were not enough to go around (not that it made much difference as nobody was in time). I think Remi and I were the only people to Perth who were wearing suits but not marching. I was impressed at the 50,000 people that turned up for the dawn service and the support in town throughout the day. I would like to think that a similar day in the UK would be so well supported. Nicky and I then went for an afternoon sail on the Tall Ship Leeuwin 2 – billed as a chance to pull up sails and crew the boat, but actually more a money spinner for the trust where you were crammed onto a deck and watch a rather inept volunteer crew do it for you. Nice to get out on the water though, and spurred us on to start planning a trip to the Whitsundays for a sail later in the attachment.

The H&S issues on site are well known, and management are leading the charge to transform the statistics from the top down. JHG head office has now sent 2 H&S Ninjas to site with the top cover of the Operations Manager for infrastructure. The stimulus for this I believe was on a knife-edge decision whether or not to close the site down for a period to rectify the H&S situation. The Ops manager gave a presentation on the JHG mission and visions to all those JHG employees who were actually on site during the moral boosting period of 1600-1730 on Friday afternoon. The emphasis was on teamwork, integrity and accountability, but I have to say that I left feeling a little patronised and, after Wednesday’s session, a little unsupported. My reaction to this was to have a think about ways to turn the South team around. My initial ideas are:

• Social activities to break down barriers,
• A daily RAG’d milestone status update (within the South, Centre and Basement blocks) back-briefed to the PM mid-weekly as a method to focusing effort,
• A change in team focus on solution finding not fault finding.

Any further ideas would be welcomed.  My feeling is that people currently don’t want to raise issues for fear or persecution.

Much like Rich has found, this week has really brought home to me the pettiness in the construction industry that takes effort away from producing a quality product. The 2 cases in particular this week have been:

1. The ongoing saga of kit on the ground. The formworkers were asked to remove their kit from an area that needs to be road-based prior to falsework construction. They claim that all the kit isn’t theirs (true, but the vast majority is) and this has resulted in photos being sent between JHG and WCF, which has developed to annotated photos and lists, which has increased to annotated, annotated photos, and coloured lists. In my view, in the time taken to log all the kit down there it would have been quicker and cheaper to programme a late shift for the crane and just move it but this would require an additional cost to someone.
2. The crane allocation.  Daily crane allocation meetings have intensified to the extent that PM’s and Construction Directors now attend. At 2 hours for some of these meeting it is such a waste of senior and site management time it is incredible. What is more amusing is the bloke who is employed by one of the contractors (or maybe all of them) to sit on his arse and log what the cranes are lifting to ensure compliance with the timetable and give them ammunition to respond to JHG.

I have said it before, but this job would be so much simpler if there was only 1 or 2 contractors! Engineers and managers could then focus on their primary role and help bring the project back on track.

Excessive time wasted on documentation

The senior project manager has been away this week so the atmosphere has been much more relaxed, fewer signs have been printed and more decisions made.

A significant portion of the car park slab in my block was poured last Friday.  We take it in turns to stay late and lock up the site and the more experienced members of the team saw me off, the slab was brush finished which apparently requires the concrete to be just right and means that the new boy gets to stay on site until 1930! 

Politics have been interesting this week, relations with the sub-contractor are somewhat strained and the delays in the build are growing and it has all become a bit odd.  I’m trying to avoid getting involved if I’m perfectly honest, I’m quite interested in seeing how civilians resolve conflict.  The activity that has brought this to a head has been the standard of the gas membrane that is being placed under each of the blocks.  An extensive ground investigation and gas monitoring survey found that they is no gas on site, the building inspectors decided that the inclusion of a gas membrane is the minimum they expect and rather than spend the time and money in trying to convince them that there is no need Osborne decided that it was easier to just get on with it rather than fight public sector bureaucracy (I’m sure we all agree it was probably the right decision).  Now this means that we have to fit the membrane correctly as it is inspected before each slab pour, unfortunately the sub-contractor is trying to pay it the least amount of attention possible.  The slab pour that went ahead last week had membrane workmanship that was pretty poor, the inspector came to look at it and only just passed it; because of this we have been rigid on standards this time around and this has caused arguments between the one of the site managers (who does need lessons in diplomacy from time to time) and the sub-contractor’s foreman.

This week I’ve been acting as student liaison, on Tue I had a graphic design student to take around site to take photos (including yours truly) for a project on construction, the process of getting all of these photos approved by the companies who have an interest has been slightly painful as the on site computers can’t deal with the size of the photos and I’ve had to bring them all home to resize and send on.  On Wed I had about 12 students from the University to come and ask questions for their Construction Management assignment, their question set was identical to the one that I completed 11 years ago for the same lecturer and slightly more recently for you Mike.  A lot of the questions looked similar to AER 1 and so I provided them with a copy of that (but didn’t tell them that I’d also sent it to the lecturer to stop them copying) and a few other bits and pieces.  All of this is so we can grab a few more points for considerate constructors.

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This week as seen fairly poor progress primarily due to rain but exacerbated by a growing supervisor turf war between my supervisor John McNally and the civil team supervisor working in the area. We couldn’t do much about the rain although we should have protecetd our excavation alot better than we did and I now understand the sort of volumes of water you can experience in this country in a very short period of time. We managed to blind abutment B in prepartion for the pile trimming to happen but the following day when checking the levels for abutment A we realised that the levels for the other abutment were wrong. My part in this was not insignificant as one of my drawings I produced to make the excavation easier to understand for the leading hand who was checking the levels for the excavator was wrong. The other two were correct and of course the designers drawings were there to cross check any ambiguity but it seems they fixated on one particular sketch. Neither I nor the supervisor checked the levels prior to pouring and so we had to rip out the blinding the next day and re-pour later in the week. Fortunately it was only a blinding layer (20MPa) of 6m^3 instead of a major structural component which would have been an expensive mistake rather than a lesson learned I think.

Blinding complete followed by rain stopping play for a day!

8 out of the 10 piles have now been trimmed to the correct RL so at least the steel fixers can start work on abutment A on mon morning and weather permitting we can get that pile cap ready to pour by the end of next week (only a 3 day week next week due to ANZAC day)

 Abutment A pile trimming complete.

The supervisor war on site has become a little childish and I am staggered about the lack of communication between departments. In this small area there have been 5 different teams trying to work around each other. At first I realised that the civil team need to take possesiion and do the bulk earth removal and I was fully aware of them and them of us after having a few meetings together and de-conflicting space and time issues. Since then the Combined Services Route (CSR) team have dug trenches right through our retaining wall areas (we have had to change the design of one of the retaining wall base slabs by cutting a corner off to miss the CSR) the rail team are constructing the overhead stanchions either side of the retaining walls and the other day a signals team arrived who started marking out and spray painting on the ground in the middle of both abutments. I am fairly sure they would have spray painted over my boots if I had stayed static for too long, this just highlights the attitude of work throughout the project for me. Everyone seems rather blinkered to their work only with little regard for others. I assumed we owned the site after all we are building the bridge and so any other trade/team would have to report to us or at least communicate with us, this however seems optional. When I have raised questions, concerns and recommendations it is met with a shrug of the shoulders and agreement that the situation is bizarre but no suggestion of why or how it can be changed. The issue still lies with the civil team who are all over the site and who have very little work left to do on this project apart from at Dickson Rd. Their supervisor has clashed with ours all week reagarding control of water on site. As we have produced the lowest point on site water will inevitably find us but due to earth stock piles further up the alignment we had directed and contained the surface water run off to abutment B only and had protected that with the use of bunding. By blocking access between the two abutments for safety reasons to stop 30T Moxy vehicles transiting through we seem to have aggrevated the civil team supervisor who decided to install a drainage pipe through a stock pile further up the site which has subsequently flooded both abutments. John McNally who is our supervisor and a fairly laid back chap responded by constructing a bund (the great wall of McNally) across the entire width of the alignment and blocking said drainage pipe. The arguments continue with both our superintendent and the general superintendent getting involved whose solution from what I can gather seems to be ‘bund more’ and ‘just deal with it’. I am not entirely sure anymore who has real control over who, engineers seem to have very little. Having thought at the start of this attachment that the structure and CoC was very similar to the Army it now seems more of a façade with little bite. The construction manager seems to have all the real power as he can fire and hire people which is what people ultimately care about.

 Clearing my tubes!

The inclonometer tubes after the civil team clipped the top of both of them a few weeks back had collecetd about 3m of water and a few clumps of clay which we managed to clear with a water hose and air compressor, heath robinson stylee effort. This managed to clear abutment A tube which I need to repeat on abutment B next week. Having had the inclonomter PDA sent back to me from Melbourne following repair I have finally taken the second reading and have a full set of initial results. Apparently the client requires a variation of no more than 3mm between readings which I think we are very close to if not slighlty over so I am not sure what the repurcussions will be. There is a history of coal mining in the area which seems to be the reason for inclonometer readings being required for any pile works on the project and I am supposed to produce a report once the abutment walls are complete and the final readings have been taken. I am not sure what form the report takes and if the readings are greater than 3mm at any point what remedial action needs to be taken. As I think we already have a reading very close to the allowed tolerance I assume the client needs to be aware of this now but what I have been briefed is that the client gets all the results contained within one report after the final reading has been taken. I need to look into this in a lot more detail over the next few weeks as the more I have got involved in the inclonometer the more questions it has raised – topic for TMR1 I think!

Hopefully this British style weather will go back to where it came from very soon and we can make some progress.

SUPERSTRUCTURE 

Maximising space and rationalizing the use of steel and concrete in Project Armada (The London Development) continues….. along of course with weekly Client changes to floor plans!  The link to ‘design development’ is becoming increasingly tenuous as the completion of Stage D approaches. Demolition planning has started and the detailed Architects (conveniently based in New York!) have started detailing the retaining wall and foundation proposed scheme. In terms of a design objectives and development, The London Development has many similarities to the nearly completed Heron Project which I visited last week.

SITE VISIT

The Heron.  WSP have recently completed Milton Court (now to be known as ‘The Heron’ and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama).  The building is a 36 storey development comprising a six storey lower level structure for the Guildhall and a residential tower above the school.  The unique nature of the building resulted in some very interesting design features.  The main objectives were to provide an efficient a buildable scheme with minimum quantities of raw materials (i.e. minimize shear walls and transfer structures).  Design development to Stage D recommended to following key elements

1.  Steel Framed:  Concert hall & foyer structure providing slim but strong vertical structure and address buildability issues associated with the ‘box-in-box- approach to acoustic performance.

2.  Concrete Framed: Tower and teaching theatre, compatible RC for the theatre and PT for the tower to provide flat soffits to all floor plates, good acoustic separation and a maximum number of floors within the stack and height restriction.

The Heron – before and after.

Steel-framed concert hall.

Concrete-framed theatre below residential tower.

‘Box-in-Box’ construction joint, note separation void between boxes.

SURVEYS

Water Leakage Survey.  Heron is one of London’s principal property developers.  As part of the development The Heron acquired some basement space under the road, through to some car parking spaces in the Barbican.  The acquisition of additional space in a 1960s development however comes at a price beyond that of the space alone.  Movement joints within the Barbican podium have deteriorated such that water leaks onto Client’s potential parking spaces, and the basement on the other side of the road is now leaking.  I had been initially tasked with providing retrofit waterproofing solutions for the podium slab, before the basement was also identified as leaking…!

Movement joint in car park column and podium slab.

The picture below was taken 2 hours into the site visit to determine the cause of the problem and agree possible solutions.  In attendance where the Client, the Heron Project Managers, the contractor SRM, City of London Surveyors, WSP, representatives from the Barbican.  A total of 8!  The eventual outcome of the visit was that the two issues were either mutually exclusive or the leaking basement was as a result of the leaking podium slab.  City of London roads are treated as structures (i.e. the surface is deemed to be an impermeable layer) and as such additional waterproofing measures are not incorporated into road build up.  Fine, until the road is dug up for services installation and maintenance!  The waterproofing at site boundaries as specified by WSP does not extend the full pavement width and is not incorporated under the pavement lights adjacent to the Barbican car park.  A number of possibilities were identified, all of which would see financial responsibility with a different party – funny how that added at least an hour onto the investigations!  It was decided that a water test be carried out by the contractor using a Barbican fire hydrant and coloured dyes to establish the source of the problem……. so look forward to more exciting photos next time in colour!!!  In conclusion, water is extremely difficult to trace through structures!

The water source identification team adjacent to the Barbican on the left hand side.

Tracing the water through to the Heron basement (on the right hand side of the above picture).

Employee Survey.  On return from the site survey, I was approached by one of the Directors about my thoughts on the WSP employee survey, which are now mandatory in almost all large UK firms.  He told me that the Structures department boss was very disappointed, surprised and concerned about the results.  He asked me to put a few bullet points together (from an outside/military perspective) for a meeting the following day.  After a year in industry these were my slightly de-militarised thoughts:

 1.            Survey results.  Unfortunately I have not yet seen the survey results, however, from what you said I understand that there was a general consensus of apathy and negativity towards the way people feel they are managed and the company in general?  The two main reasons people fail to complete, or adopt a ‘whatever’ attitude towards surveys is that they either:

             a.            Don’t believe they will be listened to.

            b.            Don’t believe that actions will be taken from the results.  

This causes results to be skewed towards those who completed the survey (i.e. highly satisfied or disgruntled).  Before deciding on any action, it is therefore important to fully analyse the results and carry out further investigation if required (i.e. interviews or meetings to determine the crux of the issues).  For future surveys, techniques to maximise employee  participation could be used (e.g. one company used charitable donations post 50% completion in individual units).   

2.            Response to survey.  The next stage is demonstrating to employees that their opinions count and that they are a valued part of the decision making process.  This can be simply achieved by communicating what the survey said and what actions have been taken as a result of employee feedback.

3.            Engagement. Fundamental to dissatisfaction is an unengaged workforce.   Engagement is quite simply meeting basic, social and esteem requirements of employees.  Research show that “people join an organisation but leave a manager”!  Engaged employees are proven more likely to share their views with their managers, take less sick days, have improved performance and productivity and be more innovative.  Engagement is a reflection of a manager’s individual leadership qualities, and will only happen if managers have a clear understanding and are committed to realising the benefits of motivated and value-adding employees.  This requires buy-in from all levels of the organisation.  

4.            Managers responsibilities.     Every employee is different and hence effective engagement requires a very personal style of leadership.  This involves managers making every effort to understand the needs and aspirations of their team (both within an individual and group context).  This can be achieved through regular meaningful engagement: informal (daily/weekly), formal (6 monthly annual performance and potential reports and PDRs).  Goals should be set at the start of every project which are clear and realistic, feedback should be immediate (and honest) and every effort should be made to match skill and challenge levels appropriately.

5.            Employee responsibilities.  Employees should be incentivised to optimise their performance and potential, as well as contributing to the wider company ethos.  Manager’s reports should reflect employees levels of engagement, and they should be rewarded accordingly (responsibility, position, project assignment, promotion*).  Engaged employees should be empowered to instigate change, from changing dysfunctional or unpopular processes, to tasking graduate engineers to get maximum participation at a company team building event.

*I appreciate that there are always financial constraints however, fewer quality, ‘engaged’ and appropriately salaried personnel are much more valuable than many short-term ‘unengaged’ employees.

I have since been asked to a follow up meeting with HR…… sports afternoon Wednesdays, early knock off Fridays and ‘enforced fun’ socials here we come….!!!!

The latter part of last week and the former part of this week have been spent preparing for the pour of Upper Basement Zone 4, oh and dealing with the aftermath of the Zone 3 pour. We called in a professional slab scanner to assess the perceived cold joint and had the lads from Cut’n’Break take a couple of core samples along the join. This involved a nifty little radar car (not dissimilar to Imran’s efforts on his attachment) that was rolled around the surface taking scans of the slab. This was initially done to locate the core samples in the dodgy areas and do so missing the reinforcement – not entirely successful but it seems nothing ever is. The radar car then spent the following day taking cuts across the centre line at 1m intervals in order to build a picture of the state of joint. Both sets of results came back in whilst I was on course but I have yet to have a good look at them. What I do know is that of the 6 core samples at 7 days their strengths (for a 32MPA mix) range from 25 to 10 – so I would hazard that it doesn’t look good for zone 3. The next stage is working out exactly what to do. The initial suggestion is to chip out the joint and either side of it and re-pour but the ultimate decision rests with the structural consultant.

The GPR scanner car

Example of GPR output (low point of curve = reo location)

Cored concrete sample

The fallout from this situation is that the client’s representative (CR) is not convinced that JHG are taking quality seriously and placed a suspension notice on the pouring of suspended slabs until it was proved that the processes are in place. This notice will remain indefinitely for all suspended slab pours which will be cleared for construction by the CR on a individual basis. What this means for me is not much really, I keep doing what I was doing before but just pay a little more attention to the presentation of my pour card, and ensure that site looks the part.

On Thurs and Fri I attended the Operational Safety, Quality and Environmental (SQE) Risk Management course. I was expecting a typical half-arsed training course that nobody wanted to be at but was pleasantly surprised. Aside from a couple of days respite ‘off the log’ from site it was actually a very full and well structured course. The attendees were a mix of JHG supervisors and site managers from across the spectrum of business units as well as a couple of additional blokes who were working as contractors with JH (one of whom was a 30 year soldier in the Arty/RAPTC).  The programme was loose for the 2 days but this allowed a lot of talking around the topics which for me was good to gain an understanding of how the different units and workers approached the systems that JHG uses. The syllabus basically ran through the SQE process from Tender to Site and explained all the process’s and roles throughout. I found that it built upon the subjects that were merely touched on in the inductions, and I left with a better understanding and the confidence to implement and question the processes on site.

Whilst I was away Zone 4 was poured through an intricate system of pipes, pumps and towers. The original plan was for a 0700 pour from a mobile pump in the slip-lane which was feeding a tower pump that rises out of the slab through a penetration. This all worked fine in principle, (calculations were put together to ensure the load of the mobile pump was not too great to compromise the integrity of the piled wall) but in reality, feeding 260m3 of 120mm slump concrete through a 150mm diameter pipe for 130m and expecting it to be of a consistence (they still use workable here) that can be poured is not an act of war. I had to request a new mix from the concrete supplier which then had to be cleared through the concrete pouring contractor and the structural engineer before we could send it to commercial for pricing and order the material for the next day. A surprisingly long winded process but it covered all the bases and was completed in a couple of hours. I am told that there were issues with the pump, but nothing that wouldn’t have happened anyway (My ‘Actions On’ section of the pre-pour meeting come into their own and the delay was assessed and concrete paused at the batching plant), and also that the main hold up which delayed the pour till 1400 was because of the Unions holding their members back from site due to a H&S issue the day before. The H&S issue was one that their own union members had caused through blind stupidity – instead of waiting for a bloke to finish surfacing a poured concrete edge or going a different route, they decided to carry the concrete pump tube over him, inevitably dropping it on his head. This initial delay meant that the slab was not finished until 1900!

Zone 4 (poured) between 2 Tower Boom pumps

The CR later said that the zone 4 pour was one of the best prepared zones they had seen yet which leads me to think that they don’t really know what they are looking for. In my opinion, as the bloke coordinating both slab preparation, they were identical in preparation and only separated by trivial but obvious issues such as concrete splatter on reo. Maybe it is true that “Bull$h*t Baffles?”

Well it’s been one more week closer to the Cross rail Mile stone of excavating the shaft by 2 May, and we have got no closer.

Temporary Works

1.   The Temporary Works design for the steel platform has finally been produced and after a few alterations we have sent the final design to the fabricators.

The new delivery date for the steel platform has moved to the right and SHOULD be delivered by the 29th Apr. My fear is that once it gets delivered it’s not going to fit without some serious alterations on site… we shall see. However once the platform is in place the generator, compressor, receiver, settlement tank, siltbuster and electrical MDU can be placed in position. As you can see the platform is most defiantly on the critical path for this project.

2.   The Muck bin saga continues, it looks like the design has been approved by Cross rail, now that Merebrook Consulting have resolved the sub-basement propping issues in the building opposite. This means that the reinforced concrete slab can be poured next week and the retaining wall units put in place later that week.  

3.   The equipment steel platform on the other side of the shaft has now been designed and should go in later next week. This will allow the Concrete pump, accelerator tanks and the concrete remixer to be put in place.

4.   Finally the 80T crane platform has been signed off by Cross rail. The idea is that the Over Site Development Geothermal Piles that have been put in place will be able to take the load of the 80T crane. The majority of the bearing capacities of the piles are through the end bearing capacity and not the soil friction. As the piles are deeper than the shaft there should be limited loading onto the shaft wall.

Who is watching the Watchmen?

As the Cross rail project is funded by the public taxpayer, the client (Cross rail) has employed an entire team that monitors the contractors (BFK). This ensures that we (BFK) comply with the standards that were drawn up in the contract. However it means that every single piece of paperwork has to be authorised by Cross rail. That includes the: Daily Briefs, Work Specific Activity Briefs, Method Statements, Risk assessments, ITP’s (Inspection Testing Programs) and signing off on all the materials that we use. However, we sub contract a vast amount of work, so we have to check that the sub-contractors are applying then Cross rail ensure that we are complying, the whole process is man power intensive and massively inefficient.  Who would have thought that a Public funded project would have been so inefficient…?

Anyway, less moaning. I’m off on a two week holiday next week for my Easter break. I will keep you updated with the site photos. AS you can see below, not much change from last week. Hopefully you will see much improvement over the course of the next two weeks.

Following the successful pour of South Block’s Upper Basement Zone 2 slab last week I continued the motion to start on Zone 3 this week with a programmed pour date of Wed 10^th. This involved the coordination of concrete cylinder testing and post tensioning to ensure that the pour could be completed on time after Zone 2 had been tensioned. The stated criteria for tensioning on a 32MPA concrete suspended slab beam is 9MPa or 24hrs for the initial stress to 25% of the maximum, and 5days and 22MPa for full tensioning. In this case the structural consultant allowed the period to be reduced to 3days and 22MPa for speed of construction. The RFI to use a stronger early age mix to assist in this process has now been approved by the structural consultant but has been held up at commercial the commercial level. In my view, with a liquidated damages rate of A$180,000 per day, the increased cost of a 40MPa early strength mix will be negligible if the project runs over.

The reinforcement tying went in without major issue except a couple more clashed with PT ducts and a lack of reinforcement design for a stair core that was partially encased by the slab. The design was for finally released on the Thursday evening before the Wednesday pour placing an increased pressure on the steel scheduler and the steel provider to get the couplers to site in time to be fixed. This didn’t happen, they arrived at 1745 the day before the 0530 pour and still sit idly next to the stairs. (I can potentially use them for a penetration that has been missed from the initial steel schedule but will require structural sign off first.) The solution to this issue is to drill and epoxy starter bars into the core wall prior to construction of the internal landing. This was already the solution for the other half of the stair wall that missed the inclusion of couplers when initially cast prior to my arrival so is not seen as a major issue. In my eyes it is galling that the parts were on site prior to the pour but there was nobody there to fix them. If I could have done it myself I would have.

The clients representative made a visit to the site the evening prior to the pour and made several observations to the structural consultant about finishes on column tops (not rough enough) and splashed concrete on reinforcement. Both easily fixed, one by me with a spare piece of reo smashing into the top of the column to scabble, the other after a fair degree of effort coercing the contractor to do it and in the end having to do it the morning of the pour.

The pour itself began well. The initial concrete mix was a 32MPa with Xypex and Eclipse as the surface was to be subject to external weathering and hence would require these additives to increase its durability. This mix flowed into a normal 32MPa mix. I placed myself at the concrete pump to check the mix prior to pouring and ensure quality of the batch. About halfway through the pour the formwork contractors spotters below the deck who move with the pour monitoring any deflections alerted the site manager that one prop had settled 30mm and that the pour should move to another area while they fixed the issue. This was done but the concreters deemed the deck to move so were immediately removed to a safer area whilst an inspection of the underside was conducted. The area was re-propped and initial props placed ahead of the pour to ensure stability. The pour continued with the concrete just on the limit of its use-by time (90mins post batching). The slump had decreased but was still in range.

 The concreters then claimed the formwork moved again and were once again removed from the slab. The H&S coordinator barricaded the slab and called in the Construction Director and Project manager to manage the initial investigation. It was found that a prop was not sat on the roadbase surface and had been undermined by water flowing from the deck above and had consequently settled 30mm. The subsequent additional propping had been a little over zealous and had lifted one of the deck units 15mm give the concreters the impression that the whole deck had dropped. The slab was deemed safe and after a brief H&S representative meeting the concreters returned to work, working a nearly cold joint. This continued whilst I turned away 5 trucks that were out of range and waited for new concrete to arrive whilst the concrete pump cleaned its pipes. The remainder of the pour was relatively uneventful.

My pour card was removed for evidence in the H&S investigation. Comcare (equivalent of the H&S executive was informed but as it was not a complete of partial collapse, and the incident caused no injuries, it was not notifiable. The unions were also informed and were reluctantly granted access to site – they found nothing and were satisfied with procedures. That said the rumour mill amongst tradies is similar to soldiers and pretty soon news that the deck had collapsed and dropped 180mm were rife. I hear it also made local news and Glenn Palin, MD of JHG was also informed. I am informed that there is often a small degree of settlement that occurs in falsework but to call it a collapse is an exaggeration. The clients representative has now issued a suspension notice to prevent any further suspended slab pours until it is satisfied by a JHG report that the correct processes were and are in place to manage such issues and ensure quality of the product. My pour card formed a substantial part of this report and included density tests of the roadbase, falsework plans and sign off from a 3^rd party certified engineer of its compliance and structural stability, and sign off from all contractors that their work was to the required standard. I’m glad I had all the ducks in a line and the only issue that my PM had to answer for was that of quality management.

I was subsequently involved in the H&S investigation to establish the root causes of the problem, not to issue blame, though it was blatantly evident that everybody in the room was posturing to remove themselves from the circle of blame.

I think the incident, although it had the potential to be catastrophic, was managed well. The systems were in place to monitor the pour and have been proved to be effective. One of the bigger issues I think is one of information release. Even the contractor referring to the incident as a partial collapse sends out the wrong message from the start and required stamping out early. In the event it wasn’t and spread across the site and indeed country rapidly which only served to increase pressure to perform on an already pressurised build. The additional work to compile reports took a day from all the South engineers and PM which was time that was not spent making an impact on site.