Firth and Ryman work around tough noise restrictions

In addition to the fairly complex task of constructing four large, specialist buildings for Ryman Healthcare in a built-up residential area as part of the new Bob Scott* village in Petone, the project team are doing their best to create the least possible disruption to the neighbourhood during construction of the project’s large below ground basements which require sheet piling and considerable volumes of concrete from dedicated supplier Firth.

“As the basements to all of the buildings are particularly deep these need to be sheet piled which requires quite a large machine for the piling,” says Gary Cox - Project Manager for Ryman Healthcare. “All the work had to be carefully planned to fit around some strict conditions to minimise the disruption for neighbours.”

With the new village being built in the heart of Petone, the Council-imposed noise curfew is a requirement of the Resource Consent on all work – no noise before 7am in the morning or after 6pm at night. This has demanded extra careful management from Gary and suppliers like Firth, particularly for the large base pours for each the buildings.

“There has been a huge amount of concrete go into the 1m thick raft floors of the buildings,” says Gary. “Three of the buildings have required nine pours at about 600m3 each with the largest building requiring more. The Firth guys are great as I know we can be a little demanding at times, but they have managed our deliveries exceptionally well - even with the curfew.”

“Due to the noise restrictions we have to get as much concrete to site as quickly as possible, and have trucks backing up, but without having them sit around too long as this could affect the 40 MPa mix,” explains Ian Morby, Area Operations / Sales Manager (Wellington) for Firth. “As concrete suppliers for very large pours we will often start in the early hours of the morning to avoid heat issues, scheduling and traffic congestion. But we haven’t had the luxury of doing that this time. It has been a bit of a juggle, but between the Firth Belmont and Aotea teams we are managing very well.”

“Ian does a magnificent job for us,” adds Gary. “He calmly listens to what I need and then just sorts it out for me.”

As with all the new Ryman villages Firth has supplied, there are also large amounts of grey masonry and paving going into the build. With about 60,000 20 series and 10,000 15 series blocks supplied so far to Bob Scott, Ian estimates that Firth has delivered about half of what’s required.

To complete the work Ryman will also use Firth’s Flagstone paver (450mm x 450mm x 50mm) in Volcanic Ash and Firth Holland paver (200L x 100W x 50D mm) in Terracotta for the extensive network of paths and landscaping around each of the villages.

Gary, who has been commuting for close to two years between Petone and his family home in Tauranga says, “the Bob Scott village is the largest residential apartment building in New Zealand to be built using base isolators to guard against earthquakes. It has been a complicated project.”

The new village is on track for completion in early 2018 with the main building - which includes the village’s care centre, cafe, bar, swimming pool and movie theatre - open on three levels with work progressing on the final two floors. The first apartment block, named after Petone rugby stalwart Don McIntosh, was finished at the end of 2015 with the third stage of apartments, the Andy Leslie block, to follow.

*Robert William Henry ‘Bob’ Scott MBE was a Wellingtonian, a New Zealand rugby union player - who represented the All Blacks as full-back between 1946 and 1954, and a World War II veteran. He was a member of the Petone Rugby Club and was part of the club committee between 1966 and 1970.