Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

This week for me has been somewhat interesting.

The project director for the South Bank Tower, Shaun Tate, has gone on leave for three weeks and the duty seems pretty out the loop with what is going on.  Therefore the Major Projects Director for Mace has gotten involved to sort out any problems!

Well, we have a few problems! So today the Major Projects Director sat through a temporary works meeting between Mace, PC Harringtons (sub contractor for the core sliupform), Walsh Group (temp works engineer) and AKT II (the Structural Engineers).  Normally there are six of us in our weekly meeting.  Today I counted thirteen at the table. 

At discussion was the metal plate that attaches the 3 x Macalloy hanger rods (carrying up to 7600kN ULS force between them) to the reinforced concrete core.  Now steel to concrete connections are the Structural Engineers (AKTs) bag.  They (AKT) are meant to own this.  Sadly for AKT they have so much already on their plate they’ve given us no time to sort this out.  And by sort this out I mean determine the detail.  How will this work?  How do we build it!  This has meant that instead of sorting the problem out at the appropriate level (meeting of 5) we have everyone at the table (meeting of 13 including the client).   

Well the outcome of todays meeting was (thankfully) generally positive.  The work I had done this (and last week) to understand the detail of how the rebar (in the wall) between, above, to the side and below the plate interacts with the massive hangers seemed to pay off.  AKT ended up having a long list of ‘to dos’.  (This includes re-designing, de-conflicting the rebar and providing some direction).  The slipform does not appear (as yet) to be delayed any further than the 17 April 14( to depart from Level 30).  So all is good. 

What I have learnt from this is how work shy and sloppey shouldered Structural Engineers can be!!!  Perhaps this is a little harsh.  But I am starting to understand the friction of relationships between contractors and designers.  Designers are short sighted and ignore the real world problems.  Contractors only shimpf that Structural Engineers will not consider the temporary state and only ever design un-buildable structures!!

The outcome is that Mace do not trust AKT.  AKT haven’t a clue how we are trying to execute the build so just choose to ignore the issue until it is escalated to such a level that they cannot ignore it! Fun fun…..

Thankfully tomorrow is Friday!  My apologies for the long post.  Rant over.