To facilitate the demolition of the existing Lift shaft/water tower at Muntons Plc, Stowmarket, we were tasked with replacing the current gravity-fed water system with a boosted water supply.
This presented some challenges:
🔎 The new Booster sets are located in an existing pump room, situated approximately 60m from the main building.
📹 The route for the new underground pipework crosses multiple services at varying levels, meaning the whole excavation would require hand digging. The client provided us with a Ground Penetrating Radar survey, which, although it wasn’t 100% accurate, gave us an indication of the location of most of the services.
⛔ The ground conditions are poor, and there are potentially pockets of contamination; the quantity of this is undefined, and as such, the whole dig would need to be treated as contaminated.
⚠️ The location of the new pipe run is within the main entrance to the factory and cannot easily be closed.
✔️ The pipework needed to be 180mm Protecta-Line.
↩️ The route of the new pipework was not a straight line and needed to curve around an existing building.
To mitigate any issues, we decided to explore the option of directional drilling. We called in South East Directional Drilling Services (SEDDS), who rose to the challenge. Two pits were excavated, one at either end of the run to just over 1m in depth, which allowed us to avoid any possible contaminants.
The drill head entered the pit and was drilled to a depth of 2400mm to avoid the deepest service. An operative tracked the drill head using a scanner and guided the driver to ensure the drill was on the correct trajectory. The drill head entered the exit pit in exactly the correct location as predicted.
The drill head was changed to a ‘Reamer’, and the pipe was attached to it. 30 minutes later, the pipe had been drawn through the bored-out hole and was in position, ready for connection to the new supply and chlorinating.
All in all, a very positive experience which saved both Gipping and our client time, money, and inconvenience, vastly reducing the manual labour requirement and leaving any potentially contaminated subsoils safely beneath the reinforced concrete roadway.
The new system will be turned on in the coming weeks, and once proven, will allow the demolition phase to commence.
