Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

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.