Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

I have been on site now for nearly a month and am quickly picking up tasks from all over the place. One of the main items I have been put in charge of is a 6km pipeline running from the Spencer Gulf to site, designed to carry seawater in and a separate pipe to return the brine water. The pipeline was designed by KBR, procured by John Holland (JH) and is in the process of being installed by York Civil. Up to now no one from JH has taken any ownership of the pipeline so it seems a good chance to actually contribute something worthwhile to the project. I have been looking after it for two weeks now and these are some of the issues I have come across:

Design and Procurement

The pipe itself and all of the fittings are to be procured by JH and free issued to York Civil. The JH team responsible for this procurement is based in Brisbane and has worked directly off the KBR drawings to procure all of the items. This has led to a number of issues, firstly individual responsible for procurement is not subject matter experts or an engineer; this has contributed to key items being missed in the procurement process including all of the gaskets and bolts. Secondly the initial design used for the tender process appears to have been done using geographical data and aerial photography this has resulted with a design that is not suitable for the ground and as a result considerable redesign is being conducted on site, which will result in some serious variation orders from York Civil. In addition these changes have resulted in many of the items procured already being inadequate or insufficient for the new design, some of which have long lead times, such as the pipe itself which has come from Turkey. This leads into the third point which is that the procurement teams method seems to be to request quotes from various suppliers; they then choose the cheapest supplier. It appears that no consideration is given to the suppliers’ location and delivery times. For example six automatic air valves are being shipped from Israel taking 8 weeks to arrive despite there being manufactures in South Australia.

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The pipeline runs across some private land, through existing easements, however the landowners were up aware of the easement. Currently they have ourselves putting a pipeline through it and the local power supplier constructing an overhead power line, to get power to our site. This has resulted in a re-route of the pipeline and narrowing of the working corridor. One of my tasks has been to construct a dilapidation report along the route in order to ensure compliance with guidelines laid down by the local environment agency.

The pipeline beginning to be lifted into place.

Construction

The drawings issued for construction along with the specifications have resulted in a design that is almost impossible to build. For example, the design requires a compaction to be provided by mechanical means around the pipes in layers of 150 mm. Once the pipes are in the trench there is insufficient space to fit equipment to compact or to test the levels of compaction. The designers are up willing to renegotiate the levels of compaction because the specification of the pipe has already been reduced by JH in order to reduce the cost. At the moment we are working with the sub-contractor to develop some trial areas to establish if the desired levels of compaction can be met by any other means.

A shot of the trial compaction area- walking in and damping down with water.

Linked in to the compaction of the pipes is the requirement in the specification for the subcontractor to check the internal diameter of the pipe following compaction. At the moment the subcontractor have not found a method of how to do this; the pipe has a number of bends so a laser cannot be used. Again because of the reduction in the specification of the pipe the designers are not willing to remove this requirement.

One of the other items I was running with was installing of 16 modular buildings that will form the permanent offices and amenities on site.

I thought I would add this for all you civils out there, seems to be some advanced version of the cone penetrometer, I did ask the guys how it worked, but they were just working it out for themselves!