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“We were supposed to be
finished on Dec. 8 and we
were rigging out the Junttan
on Dec. 7 – the pile driving
was finished a day before the
university’s exam deadline.”
– Banine Cote, Innovative Piling Solutions
night we were on site. From then on, we started at 5 p.m. and
had to finish at 10 p.m. On the weekends, we had to put in
16-hour days across four weekends to make up that time.
“We were supposed to be finished on Dec. 8 and we were
rigging out the Junttan on Dec. 7 – the pile driving was fin-ished
a day before the university’s exam deadline,” said Cote.
IPS returned to the site in early January 2017 to excavate
and build the pile caps, working alongside Globe Excavating,
14North Construction and Wright Construction as they exca-vated
the main foundation and built the walls.
“Our scope didn’t really stop at the pile driving itself. We
took this on as more of a general contractor for the foun-dation,”
said Cote. “We had sub-contractors of our own.
We had 14North Construction Ltd. doing steel reinforce-ment
and pile cap building; we did our own excavating and
Globe Excavating did tailings removal for us; and we worked
in conjunction with Wright to make sure their walls were
stood on piles that had been infilled correctly. P. Machibroda
Engineering Ltd. performed 16 Pile Driving Analyzer (PDA)
tests for dynamic load testing and Topping Engineering did a
lot of the work for the driven pipe piles and earth retention.”
Given the physical restraints of the job site, it was a chal-lenge
getting equipment in and out. The project entailed the
use of a Junttan PMX22 tracked pile driver rented from HPS
Pile Driving & Drilling Services in Edmonton, a Texoma 800
drilling rig and a Texoma 600 drilling rig that were used to
pre-drill holes for the driven pipe piles, a Hitachi 270 screw
pile unit, Bobcat T750 and S650 machines, a SkyTrak zoom
boom, a Bobcat E85 mini excavator and a CAT loader, all of
which were IPS-owned.
As the largest piling company in Saskatchewan, IPS spe-cializes
in taking a creative approach to the most challenging
tasks – a skill that certainly came in handy on the university’s
CSRB project.
“It wasn’t a typical boxed project where they give you
the drawings and then you price it and do the job,” said
Cote. “I think the hardest part of this project was swinging
from Saskatchewan fall to full-blown winter. On the same
job we went from 20 degrees Celsius to -45 degrees Celsius
(68 degrees Fahrenheit to -49 degrees Fahrenheit), all while
trying to work 24 hours a day to keep driving the schedule.
We had eight pile caps that had to be dug four or five feet in
the ground, and we had three feet of frost on excavated soil
within a week. It was a bad cold snap.
“We stuck through it the whole time. In the end, the uni-versity
was very pleased with how the job came together and
how quickly the schedule moved along.”
PILING CANADA 79
/www.westernequipmentsolutions.com
