Solutions. His company was originally contracted to drive
piles for eight bridge structures, but six more were later added.
“Those foundations were tentatively scheduled to be
drilled caissons and then they changed it to piling based
on their geotechnical investigation,” said Abele, adding that
Bermingham’s performance on the jobsite also factored into
the decision.
“We had one four-man crew that worked continuously,
and we just kept sequencing from bridge to bridge and it
worked very efficiently. We were satisfying the owners’
requirements for schedule, so I think that was one of the
reasons to go to the piling alternate for those other struc-tures
as well,” Abele said.
“It’s a testament to our personnel that their performance
was definitely a factor in helping us procure more work.”
Abele says it’s also a credit to the Bermingham crew that
they were able to power through their work on the Regina
Bypass project during a cold Saskatchewan winter in 2016-17
without any weather-related stoppages.
“Going in, we weren’t guaranteeing that we would work
through the winter. It was all going to be weather dependent,
and if the conditions were warranted to halt then we were
going to do that and then return in the spring,” Abele said.
“The conditions were bad, but they weren’t intolerable, so
we continued driving through the coldest temperatures. That
actually gained the client a little bit of schedule… because
everyone was expecting that we were going to shut down for
some of the winter season,” he said.
“We worked right through the winter and that was a testa-ment
to our crew. They worked extremely diligently.”
Large capacity crane used
In total, Abele says, about 600 piles were driven for the 14
bridge structures, most of them 14-inch H-piles in various
sizes. Some 30 inch by three-quarter inch pipe piles were
also installed. The piles were sourced from various compa-nies,
including Dominion Pipe and Piling, Samuel Roll Form
Group and Pipe and Piling Supplies Ltd.
All of the piles were installed using a Bermingham L-23
vertical travel lead system with a Terex HC 165 crawler crane.
“We used a big 165-ton crane, which was probably a little
bit more than what would typically be needed on a piling job
like this, but we wanted to be able to drive the majority of
piles in single lengths. The requirement then was to have a
fairly long lead with a large capacity crane,” said Abele. “We
went up to 130 feet and drove up to 115-foot-long piles in a
couple of locations.”
During the project, a Berminghammer B-5505 diesel
hammer was used to install the H-piles and Berminghammer
B-64 diesel hammer was used to drive the pipe piles. “We only
had the one rig, so we switched when we had to,” Abele said.
He adds that noise wasn’t a concern during the pile
driving process. “Generally, it was all greenfield construc-tion,
other than along the highways, so we were okay from
that perspective.”
Abele notes that the soil conditions encountered by the
Bermingham crew during construction were fairly consis-tent,
but it did vary from site to site.
“In some cases, it was relatively easy driving… but it was
extremely hard driving for a few of the bridges. We had an
extremely hard layer that was above the intended toe in
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