Underground at the 2012 London Olympics

How upgrading utility services helped London rapidly reclaim a blighted district and create a world-class Olympic venue

Jim Haines

Utilities Design Manager, Olympic Park Atkins London, England

hen the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) bid to stage the 2012 Games on a site to be developed in the Lower Lee Valley of London’s Stratford District, they were not taking the easy way out. The blighted one-squaremile site northeast of the city center was home to numerous industrial facilities—some contaminated and abandoned, others still in use—as well as a landfill, a slough of discarded appliances and blocks of disheartening apartments. The River Lee and several other debris-filled waterways crisscrossed the site, and area plant life was mostly invasive weeds.

In 2007, after LOCOG was awarded the contract to stage the games, its public counterpart, the Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA), selected Atkins to provide engineering design services for the 2012 Games, and assist in the complete transformation of the site from urban blight to the outstanding Olympic Park. This marked the first time in the history of the Games that a firm has been designated the “official engineering provider.”

Initially, the firm provided the “enabling works” for the park, essentially cleaning up the site through a large soil and water remediation effort before the development could begin. The soil remediation portion of the project ultimately treated two million tons of soil, making most of it suitable for reuse on the site. It became the UK’s largest soil washing to date.

As the enabling work progressed, Atkins was given additional responsibilities including the engineering design and technical management of utilities for the park. This included the diversion and removal of existing utilities, as well as providing scheme designs for new utilities infrastructure, some of which is permanent and some of which is temporary.

The engineering design scope of the new utilities infrastructure includes:

• An electrical substation (132 kV) and distribution network (11 kV, with 140 electrical substations).

• Water networks (potable and nonpotable).

• Gas networks (intermediate and low pressure).

• Telecommunication network.

• An energy center (providing both heat and cooling as well as electricity generation) and associated heating and cooling networks.

The company was also enlisted to provide engineering design services for bridges, structures and highways in the northern section of the park. This increased breadth of responsibility facilitated coordination among Atkins’

The new Olympic Park, center of the London 2012 Games, was a ground-up transformation from blight to brilliance. Photo credit: ©LOCOG

An older electrical transmission tower being dismantled at the Olympic Park site to make way for new site development. Photo credit: London 2012 © ODA 2008

utilities and transportation practices that would have been much more difficult and time-consuming had they not been part of the same corporate family.

Planning for new systems

The fragile web of utilities serving the area had evolved over many decades, without a master plan. All of the area utilities required a complete overhaul to satisfy the needs of the more than nine million visitors and athletes expected to attend the 2012 Games. For precisely that reason, staging the games in the Stratford District will provide myriad long-term benefits and influence the infrastructure investment for many years to come, though in the short run it was not an easy site to develop.

Aside from implementing a comprehensive system of utility services that would work for this compact but demanding site, engineers faced three specific challenges. First, the entire project had to be completed relatively quickly, as infrastructure development projects go. Many activities that would ordinarily have been done in sequence had to be undertaken simultaneously. With that as a given, the second challenge became managing a large number of simultaneous construction activities—remediation, demolition, earthmoving, utility work—within a compact area. These activities were further complicated by the existing waterways that divide the overall area into even smaller parcels. Lastly, the utilities had to be adaptable, able to provide peak capacity through the end of the 2012 Games, and then deal with the reduced demand in the shortterm post-Games period, as well as projected levels in 2025.

Another factor came into play with regard to scheduling and coordination when the ODA decided to seek private sector investment for the development of Olympic Park. On the utilities front, that meant soliciting design/build/ own/operate bids for separate systems instead of pursuing the simpler route of an integrated multi-utility bid package.

This approach also added to the complexity of the project because each host utility company had its own standards and requirements. Atkins decided on entering into a dialogue with each of these companies to ensure adoption of the assets, in most cases prior to games.

The legacy installation

To minimize investment on excess long-term capacity—and to keep the post-Games site from being cluttered by underutilized utility infrastructure—engineers designed the new systems for easy downsizing. For example, because electrical demand during the Games will be three to four times greater than subsequent demand, electrical networks have been designed to permit easy removal of numerous step-down transformers. Additionally, many fixed utility assets have been installed coupled with temporary facilities, such as standby generators, switchboards and cabling, to provide extra capacity in peak demand.

Appearance counts

For the sake of both efficiency and appearance, Atkins’ utilities group worked closely with its highways group and the utility companies on where the utilities crossed roads, waterways and other obstructions in the park.

Atkins developed plans for more than two dozen attractive new bridges on the site for both people and utilities. While Olympic visitors may appreciate the clean lines and curves of the bridges, what they will not see are the diverse utility pipes, cables and ducts tucked inside the tub girder design used for many of the new structures. This design efficiently accommodates numerous utilities—more than are ordinarily associated with any one bridge— while also shielding them from view. The result is an aesthetically pleasing yet structurally efficient solution.

To meet the challenge of separating so many utilities inside the box girder, an internal support structure was devised that, in cross-section, looks like a great honeycomb. Beyond supporting sleeves for the utilities, these supports also torsionally stiffen the bridge.

The new Energy Center provides heat and cooling, as well as electricity. Photo credit: London 2012

The new Energy Center provides heat and cooling, as well as electricity. Photo credit: © Atkins

Coordinating the variety of utilities within the box girders was no small task. Atkins worked with numerous utility operators to reach agreement on where their equipment would be placed on the bridge. Part of the complication came from the lack of an equivalent standard protocol for utilities sharing space on a bridge similar to standard protocols used for vertical separation underground.

Collaboration was greatly aided by a live integration of all Computer Aided Design (CAD) models in one system that was accessible to all, facilitating coordination of the many utility services.

Utilities were threaded through sleeves in the box girders after each bridge was built, so the sleeves for the utilities had to be accurately aligned before the pipes were pushed or the cables pulled. The utility services also had to be threaded between transverse stiffeners (steel plates) welded at regular intervals within the box girders.

About the future park

At just over 111 acres (45 ha), London’s Olympic Park is the largest new urban park to be created in Europe in 150 years. After the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games have ended in midSeptember, the Olympic Park will close for transformation. Temporary facilities will be removed and other restoration and conversion activities will be undertaken. The area will reopen to the public in 2013 as the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Jim Haines is Atkins’ utilities design manager on the Olympic Park. An engineer for more than 35 years, Haines has worked in a variety of industries on large projects including Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow Airport and North Sea oil production platforms. He can be reached at Jim.Haines@atkinsglobal.com.

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