5 minute read
Ambassador Report, Clare Ferguson
AMBASSADOR UPDATE
Clare Ferguson IPWEAQ Ambassador
I was delighted to have been invited to become an IPWEAQ Ambassador and to attend the IPWEAQ Annual Conference in Cairns in October.
Since then, I graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) degree, majoring in Civil Engineering, from the University of Southern Queensland in December. Luckily, we had an in-person graduation ceremony unlike many other students over the past two years which was super exciting.
I started studying part-time in 2015 and have been able to work in a variety of engineering roles during those seven years to graduate not only with a degree but with a whole lot of experience under my belt. In 2019, I joined the Proterra Group as a Technical Officer and now as a Civil Engineer.
Now I’m on the hunt for things to do to fill in the many hours of spare time!
Recent Projects
I have been working with Goondiwindi Regional Council (GRC) since their flood event in February 2020 to help project manage the reconstruction of their damaged assets. We obtained over $9 million in funding from the Queensland Reconstruction Authority in 2020 to rebuild GRC’s assets to preevent condition. Work on the roads commenced in March 2020 with three full-time work crews engaged to complete more than 164 kilometres of restoration work ranging from 50 mm gravel top ups to entire sealed road replacements.
Not twelve months later, in March 2021, Goondiwindi experienced its worst flooding in over a decade. Roads which had only recently been restored were damaged again, and others we hadn’t made our way to yet were damaged even more. We collected GoPro footage of every road within the Goondiwindi Shire and prepared several funding submissions based on the road type (gravel or sealed), location (east, middle or west), culverts and other specialty categories. After meeting with the Queensland Reconstruction Authority in the middle of October to review the applications, we pressed the submit button for $61 million of funding shortly after. While waiting patiently for the submissions to be returned, Goondiwindi again experienced severe flooding. Rain from late November 2021 resulted in widespread flooding lasting for over a month. The most severely impacted area this time around was Inglewood with the town becoming completely cut off for several days.
So come December 2021, we had reconstruction work relating to damage from February 2020 well underway, submissions lodged for flooding in March 2021 and now the majority of the shire’s roads underwater… again.
Challenges Faced:
The steel reinforced concrete pipe supply issues being faced by the whole of Southeast Queensland has changed the way our projects are planned and resourced. Paul Adam, Chair of Concrete Pipe Association Australia (CPAA) presented on IPWEAQ’s Public Works TV (PWTV) in April 2021 on the issue and, although as much as possible is being done to mitigate supply delays, it’s something the industry is going to have to accept for the foreseeable future. Usually, the first step in planning
Clare with her partner, David Clare with her parents
Clare presenting awards at the 2021 Excellence Awards
Drone footage of Inglewood flooding (Source: ABC 2021 via Paul Williams)
a project is ensuring you have adequate plant, equipment and personnel and then materials are ordered as needed and on an ongoing basis. At the moment, some reinforced concrete items such as box culverts and large pipes have a lead time of over 30 weeks – something unheard of in my lifetime – and therefore need to be ordered as soon as funding is approved. This means that councils are spending significant portions of their funding at the start of the project when work onsite might not start for another five or so months.
In addition to the supply issues surrounding pipe culverts, we are faced with the challenge of trying to source and prepare more than 912,000 tonnes of gravel from local quarries ready to use in road reconstruction on council’s large, unsealed road network. Many of the quarries in GRC’s shire are privately owned and unlicensed as there has previously not been a need to take more than the 5,000 tonne per pit, per year limit set by the Department of Environment and Science. This time around, we need to take up to 50,000 tonnes from several quarries within an 18-month period. Our in-house Environmental Officer has been sifting through Council’s list of quarries to determine which sites are already on the Environmental Authority, which ones do not need to be, and those which need to be added as a matter of urgency.
The other challenge experienced with this project is the shear volume of work needing to be completed in a relatively short amount of time. We have 3,233 days’ worth of work in the March 2021 program to complete in only 270 working days. This does not include over 100 days’ of ripping, pushing and stacking gravel before we can even start road reconstruction. With two of the larger contractors in Goondiwindi already engaged, completing the last of the February 2020 event damage, sourcing contractors with the equipment and knowhow to complete the magnitude of work required is proving difficult. We need at least 10 full-time work crews to complete the work before the 30 June 2023 deadline – not an easy feat in a small regional town like Goondiwindi.
The benefit of working in a small town however, is that contractors are generally happy to work together and pool resources to ensure work is completed on time. Council will likely engage contractors to push pits or reconstruct roads around their local area which has the benefit of minimising transportation costs as well as providing several contractors within the Goondiwindi region with ongoing work until at least 30 June 2023.
