Extremely tight deadlines met by CSP at UoC
Along with many other organisations, the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes had a major impact on the University of Canterbury (UoC) with all of its buildings and facilities affected. As a result, student numbers were down 15 per cent in the following year, prompting the UoC to develop a campus-wide redevelopment programme to refresh and modernise the facilities and supporting infrastructure – at a cost of $1.1 billion over a 10 year period.
Six years later and the first of the new engineering buildings in the programme has been completed by Hawkins Construction, with new streetlight columns from CSP lighting the way to the front doors.
The work programme, lauded as ‘one of the largest building projects in New Zealand’, includes the development of ‘Canterbury Engineering the Future’ (CETF). The CETF project aims to expand and modernise New Zealand’s best College of Engineering so it can retain and improve its world ranking.
The project includes the strengthening and refurbishment of three of the buildings that make up the University’s engineering precinct, namely mechanical engineering, civil and natural resources engineering, and electrical and computer engineering. The previous chemical and process engineering wing has been demolished, the current core of the complex will be expanded, and a new chemical and process engineering wing and a structural engineering laboratory are being built.
“We are the main electrical contractor on CETF,” says David Moon, Contracts Supervisor for Aotea Electric Canterbury. “The first of five new buildings in this part of the UoC was about to be completed and, to enable Hawkins to obtain final sign off on the building, all the paths and surroundings also had to be completed to ensure the safety of people in the area. It became a bit of a scramble to complete the exteriors to coincide with the completion of the building itself, and it required the installation of lighting columns for the immediate surroundings.”
“We tried all the suppliers to see if they could supply lighting columns within two to three weeks,” explains David. “CSP was the only company able to meet the extremely tight deadlines.”
“It was a very tight time frame for everyone but our production team said they could do it, so we agreed,” says Jeremy Mallender, Sales Engineer for CSP. “We worked with David and managed to have the columns delivered exactly as promised.”
| “We are extremely grateful and impressed with the service we received from CSP,” adds David. “It wasn't like the columns were sitting on the shelf - we required 11 x 6m standard Oclyte® Streetlight Columns, but they also had to engineer 17 x 4m Oclyte® Streetlight Columns as well. It was a supreme effort and they will certainly have a very good chance of getting further work out of us. Thanks again to Jeremy and the team at CSP.” |
The CETF project will expand and fully modernise the College of Engineering, with work scheduled to be completed by the start of the 2017 academic year.