Real-Time Monitoring A Hit Down Under
In the heart of Brisbane, Australia’s third most populous city, constructioncompany Watpac Australia Pty. Ltd. has a contract to build a $570-million (US) project in the Southbank cultural precinct that will integrate residential, commercial, hotel and public space with a public transport hub. Southpoint Development will soon be one of the largest mixed-use, transportation-oriented developments (TOD) in Queensland.
The site already includes a very busy railway corridor, a bus tunnel and a historic building. This required Watpac to provide assurances to the owners of those assets — Queensland Rail, TRANSLink and the South Bank Corporation, respectively — that the 12-month construction process would not damage them. With this in mind, the company needed a geospatial solution to monitor the work in real time, non-stop, from start to completion, and alert it to any deformation that could lead to a collapse and endanger lives — so that trains and busses could be stopped before they entered the hub and construction personnel could be evacuated in time.
“Our goal was to provide a level of assurance that there was no effect on the tunnel or the rail line,” says Dave McIlwraith, a Watpac project manager. “It was very important to us to provide the stakeholders comfort that what we were doing would not affect their infrastructure.”