Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

A quick bit of background:  The St George Hospital construction project is funded by Health Infrastructure (part of the Ministry of Health), the end users are from the Local Health District (New South Wales Health).  Brookfield Multiplex are the principal contractor and the contract is with HI; there is no formal agreement between BMPX and the local health board.  However, whilst HI allow the non-financial decisions to be made by the end users they are not formally a decision until HI have confirmed them.  As the CI pointed out during his visit, this is very similar to the set up of DIO/MoD (read HI/MoH) and the Army/Navy/RAF (read end users).

The issue:  In the first two months with BMPX I have spent an inordinate amount of time in user groups, workshops and completing reviews of marked-up documents.  It seems like every time we have a review the number of comments and changes increase rather than decrease.  Therefore, at what point do you stop asking the client what they want and simply tell them what they are getting?

Taking Security as an example; during the concept design phase the security drawings were signed off by the LHD management, the variation costs agreed with HI and the documents updated by the subcontractor.  Subsequently there was a review of which doors needed to be automatic and which needed to be held open.  Again, these were agreed with the LHD management, the variation agreed with HI, and the drawings updated by the subbie.  At this point the drawings landed on my desk with the instruction of “can you set up a final review to close out the final comments on these”.  Simple.  The result of this “final review” was nearly 12 hours of user groups spread over 3 weeks and over 150 new comments, questions, alterations and good ideas from the nurses and doctors that will use the new hospital.  All this has to go back to LHD management and the financiers at HI to review and accept/reject.   Only then can the drawings be updated (again) and a “final, final” review be conducted – I may forget to invite anyone else to this and just issue the drawings.

Luckily for me, as I did such a good job with the security workshops I now get to do the Medical Service Panels and the Nurse Call as well.  Over the next few weeks if you see the headline “Army Officer beats up nurses with rolled up design drawings” you will know why!

The solution:  ?

At the risk of sounding like Jessy from the fast show (for those old enough to remember that): This week I have been mostly working on the redevelopment of the Wood Street Police station…

This is the headquarters of the City of London Police (CoLP). A sub-branch of the Met that look after the area around St Pauls and the financial district in the centre of London. The site was built between 1963-66 and sits within a compound containing buildings sat around a central courtyard, all on a two storey basement.

I can’t give you plans or internal pictures of this as I’m not allowed to download them from our secure server. Apparently they think me not trust worthy. What do they think I’m going to do? Upload them to a blog? How dare they?! SO all these photos are open source. And if you really a look inside you can watch this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01rrjbx/building-sights-series-4-5-wood-street-police-station

The plan is to put a 16 story tower in that courtyard adjacent to the existing tower. There are some problems with this…

Firstly the foundation design. The site is probably sat on London clay. I say probably because the CoLP won’t allow any sort of site investigation until planning has been granted since it would require a hole in the raft slab, and they don’t want one! It might have a couple of meters of gravel, but right now we don’t know. We also don’t know the ground water regime. We can guess it, and the best guess is that as soon as you cut through the raft slab water will come out. So currently the plan is to inject resin into the granular fill in order to drain the water within the working area. Gravel or not it will need piling, which leads to…

Access. The courtyard is entirely enclosed and access is via one of two vehicle “doors”. One leads into the courtyard itself and is both wide enough for a Range Rover type vehicle and tall enough for a dude on a horse. The problem with that door is that the slab that it leads onto will be removed in order to build the new building. So that doesn’t help. Behind door number two is the ramp that leads down into the basement. In order to get down to the second basement level you have to drive through the first level (that slab is coming out too) and down another ramp. You can get a low clearance piling rig, so you could drive one down. But it would be mega tricky. The better option looks like it’ll be to remove the slabs, ramps and all, and crane in the rig. There is the question of how you get the broken out slabs out. It’ll probably involve a skip, a crane and loads of pissed off people trying to get around the truck parked in the road…

There are other problems too. In order to properly assess the existing structures we went into the basement with a rebar meter. The results were a little confusing. Then we found some photos of the construction of the building and it looks like the members are steel, then encased in concrete for fire protection. Some of the transfer beams are about 2 meters deep, so breaking those out will be fun! We couldn’t get any more information as we’re not allowed to do any destructive testing until the budget has been confirmed. The budget can’t be confirmed until the planning pack has been submitted. In order to submit the planning pack we need to know what we’re doing. Which we don’t because we’re not allowed to drill a hole in the floor and find out what’s below it (among other reasons)… It’s the classic circular reference (to use an excel terminology – one for Damo).

All of this makes planning the cost of the project extremely difficult. For whatever reason WYG seem to be the only people running for this job. Maybe because it’s such a nightmare. But the in-house PM and blast analysis combination is definitely a bonus for CoLP since the new building will have to be designed to withstand an attack. That and planning this whole thing is a nightmare!

So while the structures team in Nottingham are wanting to get stuck into some Bentley action, they can’t, because if they do they might not get paid. First we have to work out what can be done, and how…