Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

This week has seen reasonable progress although in my humble and inexperienced opinion the subcontractor carrying out the FRP works holds too much control over proceedings and the rate of progress. We have a programme which most of the engineers/management look at it and utilise but I am more convinced following this week that the subcontractor couldn’t care less what the programme says as they tend to look no more than 3-4 days in advance depending on their mood that week and a more honest appraisal would probably bring that down to a ‘one day at a time’ philosophy. At present we have no regular meetings/O groups regarding Dickson Rd as with all the other structures there seems no ‘stomach’ for them or belief that anything good will come from one. There is a weekly Structures Team meeting which lasts around 90 mins and does a great job of providing situational awareness to the rest of the team regarding all the work throughout the project. My goal over the next few weeks is to try and implement a weekly progress/forecast meeting by where we review the work done the previous week against the programme and highlight any issues and more importantly forecast what we want to achieve next week and get the subcontractor to ‘buy in’ and agree what we can achieve which may be different. We engineer’s seem to chat a lot and decide when things will be done without consulting any of those actually carrying out the work. The subcontractor seems to be a sensitive beast to me (apparently not the best but certainly the cheapest) which I am sure has nothing to with the fact they are all Irish but certain management individuals are somewhat prickly by nature.

Dickson Rd is progressing with both Pile Caps now complete and backfilling of material complete on one and about 80% complete on the other. This now means we can focus on the abutment walls which I was hoping the subcontractor would start with erecting the scaffolding late last week. Clearly this wasn’t organised earlier enough to get it delivered on site for Fri morning or it was decided they had worked hard enough for the first 4 days and fancied a slack Fri before the weekend. Both abutment walls are 14m wide and 9.4m at the heightest point (due to cross fall) and we intend to pour both continuously which will be about 140m^3 each.  Concurrently throughout the week we have constructed the shutters for abutment A and we have completed the steel fixing and forming up of the outer base slabs of the Embankment Retaining Walls (deflection walls) which we will pour on Mon morning. I am very close in being able to close down my first worklots which were the piling works but I am still waiting on the 28 days concrete test results and the Pile Integrity Test results. It seems the PIT’ing didn’t go well and the results were inconclusive. This seems to be down to the individual who carried out the readings who was actually the supervisor when we were piling. The Engineer who interprets the results has said he will now come out and re-test (free of charge) but clearly we now have a 1.2m deep pile cap between the surface of where he can test and where he should be testing – I wait in anticipation of the findings!

Kemps Creek bridge is really becoming very tight for time as we approach the handover deadline to the rail team. I was on Sat duty and predominantly carried out labouring duties as we worked towards having the bridge deck ready for the waterproofing subcontractor to start on Tue and a joint sealing subcontractor to fill in the gaps between the parapet wall sections on Mon. A slight annoyance has been that the remaining pre-cast parapet wall sections were delivered without halfen channels cast into them so that we can bolt them on to the brackets. Out of around 2500 parapet sections on this job these four are the only ones without fixing points and they were actually detailed on the drawings as so which none of us picked up on. The designers response was “we didn’t think you would need them” which was puzzling. So Sat was spent drilling new fixing points and grouting in threaded bars ready for Mon so we can install the remaining sections and then pour the final CSR walkway sections to tie them in. Other work includes crack repair and closing out certain Non Conformance Reports so that that Rail can take over the site.

Sorry for the lack of photos but I have had a media issue today – misplaced camera.