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2006
Stainless Steel Awards Endecon Centurion has clinched a Merit Award in the Project category for its work on the new research station on Marion Island, the remote and most southerly building constructed on South African soil. Located on a volcanic island 1 200 km south-east of Cape Town, the building site is only accessible by barge or helicopter, while the surface area available for construction is covered by muddy mire between 1 m and 25 m deep. Specially-designed mini-piling rigs had to be used to install over 2.5 km of 102-mm-diameter piles. 3CR12, with its particular resistance to atmospheric and wet abrasive corrosion, was used for the piling, while a combination of grade 304 and 316 stainless steel was used for all the balustrades and external steel work. A meteorological station and research base, still in use today, was set up on the east coast of the island after it was annexed by South Africa in 1947. Due to the adverse conditions, several of these buildings have deteriorated to the point where they now need replacing, which lead to the current construction of a new state-of-the-art scientific research base. “To plan and construct a 4 500 m2 facility on a remote island, five days by ship from the nearest shop, called for meticulous planning by the professional team,” says Endecon Centurion director and structural engineer Hennie Stassen. The fabricator was Petrel Engineering, supplied by Trident Midrand Steel, while the client was the Department of Public Works in Cape Town. “The facility was designed, documented and quantified to the last 6-mm-long stainless-steel self-tapping screw. It called for 2 200 3CR12 tubular steel piles to be driven through the mud onto the bedrock somewhere in the depths below in order for the building to rise above the mucky mire,” says Stassen. The design was also constrained by logistics, as all the materials had to be transported from the fabricator in Cape Town by ship to the island and then conveyed by helicopter to the construction site itself. “The crate sizes and maximum allowable weights for helicopter transport ultimately affected the choice of materials. The professional team had to extend its normal construction vocabulary to include terms such as ‘packing and shipping lists’ and ‘crate codification’,” says Stassen. Protection of the sensitive environment was of paramount concern, and following a thorough environmental impact assessment, strict cautionary measures were put in place to prevent the transportation of alien fauna and flora to the island.“Some of the major services such as bulkwater storage and the generator configuration were built and tested prior to packaging for delivery. In a manner of speaking, the facility was built twice, with the manufacturing and quality control taking place in South Africa and the final assembly of components during dedicated construction seasons on the island,” says Stassen. “The
consultants were involved throughout the process, from the initial planning
in late 2001 to the final commissioning of the facility this year, which
included visiting the island on regular occasions |
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