24 July 2024:

After featuring strongly in New Zealand industry awards, the SH25A Taparahi Slip remediation project in the Coromandel has gone a step further. It has been adjudged Bridge Project Team of the Year at the New Civil Engineer Conference Awards in London.

Entered by Beca on behalf of the SH25A team – the Fulton Hogan/McConnell Dowell joint venture, Beca, Tonkin+Taylor and Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency – the project headed off seven other bridge projects and was the only finalist outside of Europe.

GM Civil, Donovan Wallace, says it is hard to under-estimate the significance of this for the team behind the 124m by 15m high three span steel/composite bridge, that was designed and built in just seven months.

“It’s one thing to set a new standard in New Zealand, but setting a standard internationally is something else. Everyone involved should feel immensely proud.”

Civil Operations Manager, James Harrison, has experience in civil work in the UK and says the SH25A approach will have appealed to the judges.

“We were given freedom by Waka Kotahi to put the traditional rule book to one side to deliver way faster, less expensively and with lower risk,” James says.

“It shows what can be achieved with a can-do, all-in-together approach and it has valuable learnings about how to address similar challenges in future, both here and internationally.”

A project of this scale would normally take between 18 and 24 months. Under urgency, the team planned an accelerated nine-month programme. They surpassed even this truncated timeframe to open for Christmas 2023, with no lost time injury (LTI) or medical treatment injuries.

Locally, the SH25A Taparahi Slip remediation project has won the Āpōpō (formerly IPWEA) Award for Innovation and is a finalist in CCNZ’s National Construction Excellence Awards (Projects $20M to $100M) and Infrastructure NZ’s Building Nations Impact Awards (Innovation category). These will be made on 16 August and 28 August, respectively.