10 days in the life of Zenit: Our site diary from a challenging job

There’s no such thing as a simple job, but a recent site in Partington, Manchester, offered extreme challenges which required fast, creative thinking to solve.

The client, Speller Metcalfe, needed critical LV diversions to facilitate remediation works and the part-demolition of a leisure centre adjacent to a school. The project would enable the regeneration of the building into a new community facility.

We needed to put approximately 70 metres of dual LV into the ground down a piece of land just wider than a car in the space of 10 days to maintain the programme.

Little did we know, the challenges were only beginning. Our site diary tells the story…

Monday 9^th February - Finding more cables than expected‍

We found the two cables on the schoolyard we needed. But, when we dug at the other end by the substation, we found five. We signalled all five, but three of them were so close together they all signalled the same. The other two we signalled showed they were powered, so we assumed those were the correct two for the diversion.  

They were right on the boundary of the site, between the school and the leisure centre, so we ended up digging an exponential amount more than the 2 metre square LV joint pit initially planned for.

The final pit was 10 metres square. We exposed the cables, sprayed up the correct ones and the civils team from DCU started digging point to point.

Tuesday 10^th February - A surprise underground plant room with bonus asbestos...

A fully-flagged section with a big manhole cover was reached which the GPR survey said was a surface water drain. The team lifted it to check and discovered a full underground plant room with asbestos lining and pipes. The job was stopped and an asbestos expert came out to confirm. The plant room looked to still be in use somewhere, although no one knew what for. The job was in jeopardy at this point and a solution was needed.

The only viable option was to directionally drill under it using a mole drill. That presented its own issue as mole drill teams are hard to get at short notice, but by Tuesday night we found a supplier – shout out to Lewis at Battersby Construction.

Wednesday 11^th February - Finding a directional drill and preparing the ground

Lewis had space in the diary. He met us on site at 6am to look at the job, confirm the depths and give us a price. We accepted it with the client’s approval and got our RAMS for the drill completed by Wednesday night.

Thursday 12^th February - The drilling begins!‍

The rig was on site at 7am. Both the holes we needed were drilled and the ducts were pulled through by midday. At the same time, the civils gang dug the other route to the TBS location and installed the ducting. The team on site completed the three cable pulls in the evening so all the LV connections for the diversion and the TBS cubicle were in the relevant areas.

Friday 13^th February - On track and everyone happy

The plinth for the TBS cubicle was created and everything was backfilled and reinstated up to the tarmac level except the jointing pit. We wanted to get the tarmacking done as well, but it didn’t arrive on time. However, we were on schedule by close of play on Friday.

Monday 16^th February - But there were more surprises in store...

We mobilised the two joints that were feeding from the leisure centre to the school first. Everyone was happy until 4pm when a major issue was discovered. The cables we signalled weren’t the right cables. They found the right ones by 5pm and diagnosed the source of the problem – the cables and signal crossed in the trenches.

We cut a core of what we thought were the right cables, re-signalled it back to the unit and then tested it again. We were as certain as we could be and jointing work started again at 7:30pm for the three diversion cables. We completed the work at 10:45pm and energised the circuit. The jointing team at Electric Cable Connections did incredible work and their dedication to getting the job done right was essential.

This led to another issue with a 60-year-old switch on the existing LV board which was bent and not functioning properly. It was too dangerous to switch on, so we informed the client and they subsequently undertook the repairs themselves.

Tuesday 17^th February - Everything completed in 10 days despite the challenges!

‍The civils gang came back to reinstate everything, jet wash it all down and finalise the temporary building supply installation so works on the rest of the job could proceed.

We completed everything in 10 days including a full LV diversion and installation of a temporary building supply on an extremely challenging site. Despite the substantial hurdles along the way, we maintained the construction programme at every point.

Ryan Campbell, Managing Director at Zenit, said:

“Everyone rallied on this job to make sure it was delivered on site. Every single bit of our supply moved at the pace we needed them to. Nobody slowed us down.”

David Boughey, from Speller Metcalfe, said:

“The Zenit team pushedhard on the project knowing the timescales were paramount to the success of the follow on works.  From a really promising start, unknown and unaccounted for underground obstruction appeared part way through and threatened complete derailment of the plans set in motion.

“With some very out of the box thinking and networking, they managed to have a directional drilling company circumvent the obstructions and complete the works in the timeline set.

“Zenit’s efforts meant the school could be diverted and re-energised on time and as planned during the half term shut down period. With a few tense moments, the diversion was a success and the pupils returned to school completely unaware of the hard work that preceded their return.”