Ed Sainsbury, Senior Engineer and Alexei Murashev, Principal Geotechnical Engineer, Wellington, New Zealand

Alexei Murashev (Principal Geotechnical Engineer) and Ed Sainsbury (Senior Structural Engineer) for the innovative design of the Gisborne Police Station piled foundations.
On the Gisborne Police Station Project steel screw piles were used as settlement reduction piles in soft material for the first time. The innovative foundation design approach resulted in substantial cost savings (approximately $1M) compared to the compensated raft or conventional pile foundation options.
A new Gisborne Police Station had to be built at the site occupied by a historical retail building. The historical building had to be demolished, but the Gisborne City Council required the old façade of the building to be retained. Geotechnical investigations indicated that the site is formed by loose sands and soft silts and has a high ground water table. There was no competent soil layer to pile into.  Conventional shallow foundations could not be used to support the new Police Station building because of low strength of site soils and their high potential for settlement.
Costly foundation options such as compensated cellular raft foundation or reinforced concrete piles were considered to provide adequate support to the building, but appeared to be cost-prohibitive and risky. There was the risk of vibration settlement associated with piling and the risk of settlement of the adjacent structures due to excavation for a cellular raft.
Detailed consideration of costs and risks for various foundation options resulted in the decision to support the building on a foundation system comprising a thin reinforced concrete raft foundation and 18 m long steel screw piles.
Full scale load tests of a 24 m long screw pile was undertaken to assess behaviour of the pile in soft material. Steel screw piles were founded in a soft silt layer and were not designed to support the total load from the building, but used only as settlement reduction piles working in the plastic phase.
The proposed foundation system resulted in part of structural load being taken by the reinforced concrete raft with the rest of the load being taken by the steel screw piles. Finite element analysis of the raft-pile-soil system was undertaken to assess the proportion of load taken by various elements of the system. 
The use of steel screw piles for settlement reduction resulted in elimination of risk of vibration settlement and risk of damage to adjacent building, and ensured fast and simple construction process.

Neil Gumbley, Senior Roading Engineer, Rotorua, New Zealand

Neil Gumbley from our Rotorua office has come up with an exciting, practical alternative to the existing plane circular manhole adjustment ring.  In his garage at home Neil has experimented with circular sections of PVC pipe, from which he has cut rings with a bevelled face on one plane, rather than the flat planar sections currently available.  These bevelled rings can then be placed on top of one another, and moved around to create a variety of face angles on the surface.
Having determined that the home built model had real potential, Neil has then worked with our clients at Rotorua District council to develop the details for the new adjustment rings.
Some important features about this new detail:

• The Manhole Adjustment rings can be used in a variety of ways to create a range of solutions
• The rings are to be manufactured from reinforced concrete, using existing technology, and possible using fibre reinforcing
• 12mm Reid Metric threaded inserts can be used to make the fine adjustments required to set the cast  iron frame into the correct position, and to support the frame until the concrete hunching has set
• The rings also include a shear key between the top and bottom rings, to resist lateral shear
• The new cast iron frame will not rock.  The design height of the cast iron frame skirt is 75mm, with an adjustment range of 0 to 50 mm, leaving 25mm locked into the lower concrete ring
• All the new components can be used easily in the field, in the same way as the current manhole components can
• The new detail will allow future adjustment of the manhole in the road.

Whilst the concept and the materials used to manufacture the new rings and lid are not new, the really exciting feather about the detail that Neil has developed is its simplicity, whilst at the same time providing a “read” solution to a national, and even an international problem.

Adrian Clarke, Information Engineer, Invercargill, New Zealand

Adrian's performance in innovatively developing RoadCam and Compendium has been outstanding. From its inception of making a Transit NZ supplied road network video easier to view, Adrian developed RoadCam which was quickly adopted through our network maintenance offices. This was later adopted by Transit NZ.  Following on from this, Adrian developed Compendium for use in the Invercargill office, this has now been introduced across a significant number of offices in NZ, and following on from last years RAM PIN workshop there is interest from our UK business.  This is an excellent innovation with Compendium allowing the user to view the network video (as per RoadCam) as well as all available data relating to the viewed section of highway.  Compendium is able to extract data from a wide range of sources.  Data can easily be sourced from Exor, RAMM, Quickmap, Opus Roading Toolbox, simple spreadsheets etc and can be displayed and analysed in various ways – tables, graphs and GIS maps. 

Louise Baker, Senior Transportation Consultant, Auckland, New Zealand

Louise's performance in the Auckland Transportation Planning group has been outstanding, and she has developed into a national leader in Travel Demand Management and Travel Choice.  Louise has worked extensively with a wide range of businesses across the Company and I congratulate her for developing the ARTA TravelWise Initiative which was launched nationally and received considerable press coverage. With this initiative, she has developed a process (including document templates & guidelines for each phase) for the design and implementation of workplace travel plans in the Auckland Region, and which may form a technical base for future legislation.

Alexei Murashev, Senior Geotechnical Engineer, Wellington, New Zealand

Alexei responded to an Opus Napier request on the Geotechnical PIN seeking feedback on possible foundation options for the new Napier Advanced Primary Treatment Wastewater Plant. Somewhat late in the piece, the client (the Napier City Council) had discovered that the site for the new plant was underlain by a considerable depth of variable soft ground deposits with a high potential for settlement (including differential settlement) and liquefaction. The Opus Napier office was requested by the client to investigate foundation options for the plant. Alexei responded to the Napier office PIN enquiry, outlining his earlier experience with ground improvement works at Wellington’s Westpac Stadium. Based on this experience, Alexei was then engaged as a specialist adviser for the Napier foundation project. He proposed a number of options including excavating and replacing the soft deposits with sound material, piling the structure and using stone columns for consolidating the deposits. The ground replacement option was chosen as providing the most economic solution which met acceptable limits for the control of differential settlements and liquefaction. It also allowed the client to complete the work with its own forces in the shortest possible time without the need to engage a specialist contractor.  The client was delighted with the solution provided by Alexei to what had been a very challenging problem in terms of cost and potential delays to the wastewater project.