The Client
With its 2007 turnover approaching €350million, the award-winning
Bowen Group (www.bowengroup.ie) is one of Ireland’s largest and
most successful construction firms. The Group offers wide-ranging
services to leading national and international clients in private and
public sector organisations, comprising general construction, civil
and mechanical engineering and health & safety. Headquartered in
Cork since its establishment in 1968, the Bowen Group also has
offices in key locations throughout Ireland and the UK.
The Project
In 2007, the Bowen Group was appointed by the Shipton Group to
manage a major project which comprised the upgrading of the
existing Douglas Village Shopping Centre in Cork. The project
involved putting in place a new link road to ease traffic around
Douglas thus creating additional pedestrian areas to help reduce
congestion there. This necessitated diverting the course of the
Tramore River through a purpose-built culvert adjacent to a busy,
6-lane motorway without any traffic disruption. To this end, the
Bowen Group sought a rock-breaking firm with the expertise and
resources to remove an estimated 5,000 tonnes of rock from the
proposed pathway of the culvert, safely and to schedule.
The History
It befell John Hilliard, a Senior Project Manager with the Bowen
Group, to appoint the rock-breaking specialists. With considerable
experience of drilling rock himself – from depths of up to 4,000
feet – John was well aware of the restrictions before him and of the
specific experience and expertise required. “It was a very sensitive
and potentially dangerous urban location, with the N25 motorway
towering some 50 feet directly above the area from which we needed
to remove the rock. Because of this, blasting was not permitted.
Also the close proximity of residential houses and
customers using the shopping centre dictated that the method used
did not produce any vibrations or fly rock. Excavators and hydraulic
breakers proved to be too restrictive and noisy, so a controlled
chemical and hy draulic pre-splitting method seemed to be the best
option,” he recalls.
A recommendation from a recognised rock-breaking expert led John
to Conor Galvin, founder of CMT Rock Services, who
demonstrated convincingly that by using a combination of chemical
compounds and hydraulic splitters, he could break through the
360-foot stretch of rock, silently and safely. A deal was struck within
three weeks, and by early January 2008, CMT had a team on site.
All was not how it seemed, however, and contrary to the initial site
investigation findings, it was primarily limestone – not gravel – that
lay along the passage mapped out for the proposed new culvert.
There was also more of it than originally anticipated. The already
demanding task of removing this was made all the more difficult by
the incessant rain at the time; firstly, in the way it transformed the
work environment into a mud bath, rendering it both difficult and
dangerous to work in, and secondly, by the need to increase the
area designated for the culvert by about one-third to accommodate
the then flooded river.
“However, the CMT team took it all in their stride,“ John recalls.
“They completed an almost impossible task to schedule and within
budget. The team was very focussed on delivering the best solution
possible in a very demanding and ever-changing situation, and well
equipped both in terms of expertise and equipment to do so. The
extent of my satisfaction was such, that I engaged them subsequently
on another project, and would expect to do so again in the future.”
