14/05/2024
Hong Kong: What’s the status of Central Harbourfront ?
For 2 years now, teams from Bachy Soletanche Group Limited have been working on the Site 3 real estate program at Central Harbourfront in Hong Kong. Having just completed lot 3A, our subsidiary has now been awarded the project’s second lot: Site 3B.
In July 2022 Bachy Soletanche Group Limited was awarded the contract for the bulk of the foundation works for the Central Harbourfront Site 3 real estate project, with Henderson Land Development Company Limited as the client. After 21 months of various unforeseen events on site, work on Site 3A was completed in the first quarter of 2024!
A considerable project in terms of the work carried out and the equipment deployed
For this first lot, our teams carried out :
- 226 diaphragm walls panels, representing more than 40,000 m3 of concrete in low headroom working condition
- 28 bored piles 2 to 3 metres in diameter with pre-founded posts 24 m, each installed with a 24m long stanchion weighted maximum 130 tons
- A 400m-long secant pile wall with 813mm-diameter piles with 198 pieces of 2m casings spliced by welding and followed by 27 tons H-beam installation through jointing 10 pieces of 4m sections to each individual pipe pile under 5.1m footbridge headroom limitation.
To be able to carry out this work 4 Hydrofraises® and 11 excavation cranes in which 2 Hydrofraises® and 3 clamshells were special low headroom models for diaphragm wall construction have been deployed.
Meanwhile, 4 oscillators, 4 excavation cranes and 3 RCDs were deployed for the large diameter bored pile. One percussive piling rig had undergone a modification to tackle the 5.1m low headroom constraint.
A site with many challenges
To carry out this work, the teams had to contend with a busy site. As the project was located in the heart of the city, there were numerous fiber optic cables, high-voltage cables, gas main and public drainages.
The bigger challenge was coming from the removal of the abandoned 1.5m large diameter interlocking pipe piles running across the diaphragm wall footprint where MTRC railway structure was in the proximity.
The complexity was further escalated since the actual depths of those abandoned pipe piles were totally unknown. After due considerations, the project team chose the most secure and safe method using rotator with special steel wedge and grab to have the abandoned pipe piles removed successfully.
Another challenge was to install diaphragm wall reinforcement cages that weighted nearly 100 tons under a 6m footbridge headroom. The solution was to design and fabricate a tailor-made low headroom cage installation framework with lifting capacity upto 120ton.
Time for Lot Site 3B
Work on Lot 3A was completed in the first quarter of 2024. With the site going well, Bachy Soletanche Group Limited was awarded another foundation lot on this project: Site 3B.
The works were advance diaphragm wall, 23 nos T-shaped panels with plunge-in steel column, together with prior slurry wall treatment to old seawall area in the adjacent Site 3B.
Congratulations to the teams on this major project.
