Whaddya mean? Bridge to Better jargon buster
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A large-scale construction project like Bridge to Better isn’t complete without a wide range of terms that aren’t commonly misunderstood. At Our Nelson we try to avoid using jargon but sometimes it helps to find out what terms mean.
Isaac Construction’s Stakeholder Manager Ged Casey and Nelson Branch Manager Toby O’Sullivan sat down to chat about all things construction. We’ve got the downlow on everything from potholing to hydrovacs.
Ged: What are some of the biggest challenges we've faced?
Toby: Probably the biggest challenge in keeping our people safe is working underground. We've investigated thoroughly and spoken to every utility owner about their underground services but that still only allows us to know roughly about 20% of what we're likely to encounter once we go below the surface.
That's obviously a massive challenge that we need to overcome to make sure we keep our people safe but also make sure that we keep city services like power and water working as they should be.
The next one is the one that you do a great job of managing Ged, and that’s looking after and maintaining good positive stakeholder relationships so we're keeping people with an interest in Nelson CBD well informed about what we're doing and I think that the work you do with the Council is a vital part of the operation.
Ged: Yep, our staff are working behind the fences but you also have to manage the situations happening outside the fence too. We have to be mindful that we know this project is disruptive, but how can we do it in the least disruptive way, and still be as productive as possible.
Ged: I’m often asked, why can't you work on different sections at a time? For example, from Rutherford to Montgomery, stop, finish the work, then Montgomery to Trafalgar, finish that, then move on.
Toby: As a man that loves an analogy, that would be like baking a cake one piece at a time. If you bake a cake, typically you'd bake the whole thing right, then ice it and it's done. If you had to bake every piece of the cake individually you would be in that kitchen for a lot longer. It's about managing the impact vs the duration, as a project team that's what we have to consider, what our impact is and how long the program is going to take to complete.
Ged: Why can't you work 24 hours a day?
Toby: If it was up to me, we would be. We have families and lives outside of construction, of course, but more importantly, we work in a city environment which has residents and it wouldn't be fair on them to have a hydrovac truck or plate compactor outside their residence. It's part of the resource consent, and as the project team, those are the rules we must deliver to.
Ged: Ok, onto the nitty gritty... what is trenching?
Toby: Trenching is typically a linear excavation of a depth greater than half a meter where we put in our new utility infrastructure such as power cables, water mains, wastewater mains and stormwater. Along Bridge Street we have three trenches. The service trench which runs along each of the business fronts, which interferes with the footpaths, the main trench which holds the new trunk water main for the CBD and the deep sewer which is going right down the middle of Bridge Street.
Ged: Why do you have so many road cones everywhere?
Toby: We get to charge per cone. No, I'm just joking. Cones are an important part of our industry and as we move through the job, cones help us internally identify hazards for our team as well as hazards for pedestrians and motorists. We review the layout daily to reduce the amount of cones as much as we can.
Ged: What is potholing?
Toby: Potholing has nothing to do with the potholes you see on the road. Potholing for us is looking beneath the surface of the road before we dig so we can plan our works to avoid those services and make sure we can deliver the job and project as planned.
Ged: Why can't you just dig a hole and put all the new services in there?
Toby: When thinking about the delivery of Bridge Street, we're performing surgery on the heart of the city. When we're doing that, it's important we have existing infrastructure working while we're putting in the new infrastructure. It has to go in the same place so we can hook up all the existing connections and make sure we don't miss any connections when we're completing the install.
Ged: What is hydrovaccing?
Toby: Hydrovaccing is where we combine a 3,000 PSI water blaster with a huge vacuum cleaner. Your vacuum cleaner at home has a nozzle of 50mm, the vacuum cleaner we're using here to suck up the gravel and material onsite is about 150mm. We use that to waterblast the ground material to expose live infrastructure, such as live power cables and live water mains so we can navigate past them safely and install the new infrastructure.
