WEST GATE TUNNEL PROJECT:
BUILDING THE PORTALS
ROADS & INFRASTRUCTURE GOES BEHIND THE SCENES WITH THE WEST GATE TUNNEL PROJECT CONTRACTORS CPBJH JV AND THEIR LIFTING PARTNER, PREMIER CRANES AND RIGGING, TO LOOK AT THE CHALLENGES IN SHAPING THE TUNNELS’ ENTRY AND EXIT PORTALS.
F
or Sam Clark, a professional crane operator of nine years, picking the first concrete segment for the West Gate Tunnel’s southern portal was the most memorable one. It was not every day he would pick a 60-tonne precast concrete section and place it on surveyed marks at a 48-metre operating radius with a beast of a machine, the 350-tonne Liebherr LR1350/1 crawler crane. “Together we would be lifting bigger loads in the end, but that first lift took the longest to plan,” he says, looking back at the nine months he operated the giant crane while the tunnels’ southern portal walls were taking shape. More than 200,000 vehicles, including a Premier Cranes and Rigging handled all of the heavy lifts for the construction of the West Gate Tunnel’s northern and southern portals.
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ROADS SEPTEMBER 2021
majority of Melbourne’s commercial traffic, travel on the West Gate Freeway each day. The West Gate Tunnel is aiming to provide an alternative to the West Gate Bridge for people travelling to Melbourne from the western suburbs and reduce large vehicle traffic congesting suburban streets. The westbound exit portal is in Altona North, just to the south side of the existing freeway and it’s where the outbound tunnel will re-surface and cars will join the surface freeway. This is where Premier Crane’s 350-tonne crawler was stationed for nine months to assist the crew with the heavy lifts to help build the portal’s entrance. As a preferred lifting partner for the project contractor, CPB John Holland Joint Venture
(CPBJH JV), the Premier Cranes team has been heavily involved with the project from the first days on the project, helping with early site establishment works, utility service re-locations, and removal of existing steel gantries. Premier Cranes also handled all of the heavy lifts around the construction of the southern and the northern tunnel portals which began in 2018 and are still ongoing. CPBJH JV started construction at the westbound portal in 2018 with clearing and preparation work on the site, before starting excavation in 2019. Apart from building the tunnels’ walls using a bottom-up approach, the southern portal construction also includes building a collector distributor
