Toma says ice conditions were
monitored constantly throughout
construction to ensure the safety of
workers. Turbidity conditions in the
river were also monitored by environ-mental
consultants to ensure that the
project didn’t cause any harm to fish
spawning grounds on the river.
Once the work platform on the
frozen river was in place, the Formula
Contractors crew used chainsaws to
carve trenches in the ice in which the
pile driving frame and the heavy steel
sheet piles were placed.
“You can’t just drive sheet piles right
through the ice or it will fracture it,”
said Toma.
Formula Contractors, which has an
extensive history working with com-panies
in the resource-based sector in
Western Canada, was hired by Encana
for the project.
It built a temporary cofferdam in
the Little Smokey River initially, so
that water within it could be drained
and construction could begin on the
water intake cell, which measured 32
metres wide, 35 metres long and 12
metres deep.
In addition to the Terex HC230 crane,
a 110-ton Terex HC110 crawler crane
was utilized onsite as the handling
crane for the sheet pile driving. Toma
says the smaller crane was also used to
install temporary H-piles and perform
other secondary work. Other heavy
equipment used during construction
included two 350-class excavators and
an Integrated Tool Carrier.
An APE 200 vibratory hammer
was used to install the sheet piles.
According to Toma, between 60 and 70
pairs of PZC-18 sheet piles were used
to build the cofferdam, while approxi-mately
120 pairs of PZC-26 sheet piles
were used for the water intake cell.
The PZC-26 piles were in 12-metre
and 15-metre lengths. All of the sheet
piles were provided by Pipe and Piling
Supplies in Vancouver.
Transportation challenges
All of the machinery and materi-als
had to be hauled in through a
winter road to the construction site.
According to Toma, this included
a narrow exploration trail through
swampy terrain that needed to be
frozen and covered with rig mats in
order to traversable by the very heavy
equipment required for the job.
“It was interesting driving down
a wooden boardwalk through three
kilometres in the bush to get up
to the side of the river,” said Toma.
“When you have a 10-axle low bed
with a 230-ton crane trying to come
in there, your vertical and horizon-tal
alignments of that road have to
be pretty straight and pretty flat or
else that machine will not make it in
there. So it was quite the planning
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