SH1 Papakura to Drury Culvert Installation

In this ongoing build-only project, our brief is to install the culvert units to facilitate motorway widening. This requires extensive temporary works to ensure all four lanes remain open, together with staging the shoring and culvert installation with the traffic flow switches.

A trio of challenges

The project, which has featured design input from Seipp on temporary works, presents a ‘triple threat’ of challenges: working close to a busy four-lane motorway, the impact of flooding and ground water, and poor conditions underfoot.

Our Project Engineer, Andrew Kingham, says his experienced team has navigated various issues: ‘Working so close to State Highway 1, there are health and safety concerns, along with the risk of disrupting the traffic. All the recent rain has affected the ground, too. But we’re happy with how we’ve handled it all.’

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Seipp – a trusted contractor

The culverts are a significant upgrade to the motorway’s stormwater capacity, replacing pipes that were outletting to farmland close to the Papakura neighbourhood.

Andrew’s team has been working some night shifts, to mitigate risks near the live motorway, while sheet-piling 19-metre lengths of steel. He points out that Seipp’s ability to design and construct the temporary works ensured his team had full control of this critically important work: ‘I think when it came to the technical aspects of the job – working deep excavations, right by the motorway – our temporary works capability was a major plus.’

At around the halfway mark for this major project, we are under budget on all works completed so far.