CSP’s Oclyte® Floodlight Columns used by Auckland Council for ‘Five Parks West’
An in depth study carried out by Auckland Council in 2012 identified a major shortfall in sports field capacity, particularly for training purposes, to cater for projected demand in the city. So, based on the findings of this study, the Council devised their Sports Field Development Programme and set aside $190m to be invested over a 10 year period for the development, upgrade and renewal of sports fields across the Auckland region.
The programme is a combination of regional and local board funded projects and includes installing artificial turfs and sand carpet fields, renewal of existing fields, new drainage, field development and lighting columns.
“The Five Parks West project is an Auckland Council initiative to upgrade current sports fields with new lighting so that they can maximise their utilisation and allow sports teams to use them during dark winter nights,” says Bruce Stephens, Sales Engineer for Auckland /Northland for CSP. “Five Parks West is one of the first projects to encapsulate five parks, instead of the usual one, with the idea of accelerating the programme to get all the parks completed before the winter sports season commenced.”
The West Auckland parks involved in ‘Five Parks West’ are Blockhouse Bay Reserve, Ducks Park, Parrs Park, Ken Maunder Park and Te Atatu Peninsula Park. “With 34 columns in total, this is the largest floodlighting project undertaken by CSP,” adds Bruce. “The columns range in height from 16.5m to 17.7 m and instead of only two lights per column the new columns can carry up to seven lights each.”
“We received the contract for three parks in West Auckland which has required the installation of 26 new Flange Mount Oclyte® Floodlight Columns from CSP,” said Raj Dhat, Contract Manager for Broadspectrum New Zealand. “Ken Maunder Park, Blockhouse Bay Reserve and Te Atatu Peninsula Park are the three parks we have been working on. We know CSP well and were very happy with the support we received from them on this project - in particular Lawrence Amos who was very helpful.”
Raj says that all three parks have the new Floodlight Columns installed and they are just working to get the electricity supply to them and install the control boxes. “Ken Maunder was a little challenging with delays due to the weather, but we should have all three parks lit up by the end of June.”
| “Our contract was for the installation of columns for Ducks and Parrs Parks,” says Doug McRobbie, National Electrical Project Manager for Cushman Wakefield Ltd. “Apart from a few hold ups with the weather all the columns are operating. No real problems at all.” |
“Some of these are also multi use parks, so in the summer they are used as cricket grounds and then can switch over to rugby grounds during winter,” explains Bruce. “This multi-use approach can be problematic when it comes to lighting them efficiently, when lighting columns on the side of a rugby ground would effectively be in the middle of a cricket ground during the summer. This issue was resolved by the use of re locatable columns, which are designed specifically to be moved between their winter/rugby location and then removed to a ‘parking site’ during summer, so that they are out of the way for the summer season.”
“We do try to avoid the double up of foundations required for multi use fields,” explains Tim Sherring, Senior Project Manager, Community Facilities for Auckland Council. “But where necessary we can create multi use grounds as we have at Ken Maunder Park. We are very happy with the Five West Parks project and the work undertaken by all the suppliers and contractors to get them completed. The sports teams will get a run on the Ducks and Parrs Park fields tonight for the first time.”