Who ever knew that starting the construction phase would require so much paper work.
We are now only 2 weeks from starting the shaft excavation. The Section 61 noise consent form has been accepted by the council. The predicted water discharge consent form has been approved by Thames Water even the British Heritage have signed off on the refurbishments to the office building. It looks like we may even hit the Crossrail Milestone of starting the shaft excavation by the 2nd May.
The major issue for this site has been its restricted site. The amount of equipment necessary to excavate an 8m radius shaft 80m deep has been enormous. This has led us to produce extra space in the form of 2 storey steel platforms. Rich Phillips would be proud of my Google sketchup concept sketch that I used in the Temporary Works Design Brief. See below Rich.
After being volunteered … I have now been nominated as the site Temporary Works Co-ordinator after successfully passing the Kier ran Temporary Works course 1 and 2 and a scaffolding course.
This has meant that a number of site issues have been left to me to resolve, the one causing the biggest headache is the muckbin area.
Muckbin Area
Unfortunately, no one joined the dots together and realised that for each 1m of the shaft excavated there would be approx. 370m3 of soil. Where to put it on such a restricted site?
The only place to store the soil is on a road between two existing buildings. However both buildings have basements and sub-basements that would require propping due to the additional loading. Anyway a solution has been found, the sketch below illustrates the concept.
With the addition of a void former the additional load can be carried pass the adjacent buildings basement and sub-basement. The only issue now is deferential settlement on the unknown services that run below the road. However we will resolve that next week.
The Temporary Works Co-ordinator role has been quite an eye opener. In recent weeks we have had to produce briefs and partial designs for: sub-basement propping, muckbin area, 80T crane platform, 2 storey steel platform to house the generator, compressor and receiver and a single storey steel platform to house the concrete remixer and concrete pump.
The next 2 weeks are extremely important. All of the temporary works must be in place before we can start the main excavation. Hopefully between now and the 2nd May you will see some big changes to the site.
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Mike, proud of you mate, I bet they loved it too! If my lot can be completed wowed by powerpoint then google sketchup must be the stuff of legend.
It was mate. They loved it. All I could think was how wowed they would have been with a rich Phillips master piece.
I did manage to run home the evening I spoke to you, it nearly killed me!
Mike, Rich, I’ve been throwing out the ppt sketches as well to everyone’s amazement. Sketches in general don’t seem to be that common I have found, 40 page word documents however are! I might wait a few months to escalate to sketchup when I know they can take handle it.
There is a beautious tipping point with the confidence required to represent a technical problem in basic terms. Actually being able to use a pencil on a piece of paper to show, in simple line diagrams, how something is going to work seems to be beyond far to many engineers today.
I like the concept of ‘deferntial settlement’, it comes close to the all too simple typo of ‘to enginerr’ which I think must mean to make a mistake too technical for most folks to realise its all b*ll*cks
Sad thing is I like the site plans too.
Mike
I am glad that you are keeping busy. An 8 m dia hole 80 m deep is quite a challenge. Not only do you have to store some of the soil on site, there is the requirement to move it off site. Do your figures include a bulking factor? Where is the ground water level?
All the very best
Neil