Golden victory for Aurecon in this weekend’s ACENZ awards

Golden victory for Aurecon in this weekend’s ACENZ awards programme

8 August 2011

It was a golden Saturday night for Aurecon, with the business picking up four gold, one silver and three merit awards at the engineering fraternity’s prestigious ACENZ awards ceremony held at Rotorua.

Excellence in manufacturing

The first gold winner for the night was for Aurecon’s manufacturing team for designing a bubbling fluidised bed boiler for the Silver Fern Farms Ltd’s Finegand meat processing plant located in Balclutha. The new boiler technology enables the use of renewable fuels (wood residues and effluent plant sludge) for steam production and reduces the site’s dependency on fossil fuels, reduces emissions and gives the client the added financial benefit of avoiding ETS charges.

Excellence in water

The Rosedale Wastewater treatment plant outfall tunnel project, one of Auckland’s most recently completed underground water projects, received a gold award.

On this project, Aurecon delivered all the detailed design for the 38m deep cascade drop shaft, the first use of a cascade in New Zealand, the tunnel and the marine outfall pipe. In addition, Aurecon delivered hydraulic, tunnelling, geotechnical, structures and wastewater expertise across the project.

The 3km long segmented line tunnel travels from the Rosedale Wastewater Treatment Plant to Mairangi Bay. The tunnel then connects to a new 2.5km marine outfall pipe to allow treated water to be discharged 2.7km off shore, as compared to 600m for the previous outfall pipe.

The Hobson sewer project was another gold award winner on the night. This project involved the replacement of the ageing sewer pipe that crossed Hobson Bay, Auckland with a 3kmlong tunnel, together with a new pump station in the Orakei Domain. The new tunnel and pump station provides for population growth in the area and will also increase recreational opportunities in the bay.

The extra capacity the tunnel provides means that wet weather overflows from this part of the network will be reduced, which means improved environmental outcomes for the area. Aurecon was involved in all of the preliminary and detailed design of the 3.7m diameter tunnel and the 6 m3/s pumping station.

Serving the community

Gaining worthy recognition for their work with NZ Urban Search & Rescue in the recent Christchurch earthquakes, was a specialist team of five Structural and Geotechnical Engineers. Three of the five engineers are from Aurecon, the other two engineers from Holmes Consulting Group.

The USAR engineering team are trained and contracted to the New Zealand Fire Service for just such an event and were deployed immediately after each earthquake. Years of specialist building collapse and building instability training by the team was immediately put to use. The team spent two weeks on full deployment following the September event and four weeks on full deployment following the February event. Long days and nights were spent assisting with immediate live rescue and victim recovery followed by emergency shoring and building stabilisation works.

“Winning four gold awards this year is tremendous acknowledgement to our Aurecon people who have been working hard to deliver excellence to our clients. It is also particularly pleasing to see the breadth of services that our gold awards have covered – from our manufacturing team, tunnelling and water teams, through to our structural engineers and our commitment to the community” continues Bruce Manners.

Excellence in survey

Receiving a silver award, the Johnsonville Railway clearance assessment project allowed for the new Matangi larger unit passenger trains. Aurecon worked closely with its client, KiwiRail, to define the operational clearance parameters and then using 3D Terrestial Laser Scanning built an accurate, spatially correct model of the tunnels comprising 4 million scanned points per tunnel.

The Aurecon projects receiving merit were:

- The NMIT building in Nelson is the first in a new generation of multi storey timber buildings. It employs an advanced damage avoidance earthquake design that is a world first for a timber building.
- The Air Nelson technical hangar with its large 80mx60m free span structural steel building with a clear height of 9.5m and overall height of 15m to the apex.
- The Trafalgar Park (Nelson) recently completed $5.9 million upgrade provides Nelson a multi-use venue capable of hosting major events, not the least of which are the three Rugby World Cup 2011 (RWC).

ENDS

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