Building new health centres can help to regenerate former industrial areas and remediate brownfield land. B&E visits a £27m project taking shape in the West Midlands.

THE GOVERNMENT’S Local Improvement Finance Trust (LIFT) schemes hold a lot of potential for the construction industry. Granted, LIFT projects are comparatively small compared to some of the grander public sector contracts, but their combined worth is pretty spectacular.

Carillion has won a spate of work on LIFT schemes in the West Midlands. The company is currently working on two schemes for Dudley Infracare LIFT (DIL), with a combined value of £55m. Carillion’s Building and Civil Engineering divisions are working yards apart to build a social care centre and a road scheme.

The company is currently overseeing the groundworks for the £27m Brierley Hill Health and Social Care Centre after subcontractor Parkstone went onsite in August 2007. It represented the third LIFT contract Carillion won from DIL; the previous contracts were a £5.5m to build a learning disabilities centre in Stourbridge, completed in October 2006 and the £8.6m Corbett Hospital contract completed in August last year. The current project is for a 10,000m2 health centre. It is scheduled to take 141
weeks and is due for completion in February 2010.

However, construction contracts are never as straightforward as they should be and the building of the Brierley Hill scheme is no exception.

Regional Development Agency Advantage West Midlands (AWM) has part funded the scheme to the tune of £5.3m due to the large amount of remediation works that need to be carried out on the site.

The organisation is keen to push the regeneration of brownfield land in the area, explains Carillion contracts manager John Walsh. This is something the heavily industrialised Black Country has no shortage of, and Brierley Hill fits the bill to the letter.

Walsh said the project’s designers bore in mind that the site was always going to be an awkward one as it is very poor ground.

DIL has planned the health and social care centre on the site of a Victorian rubbish tip. It is a chilly February morning and although there is hardly a cloud in the sky, there has been torrential rain for the last few weeks. Consequently, Parkstone has churned up the soft earth with its machinery and underfoot the site feels about as stable as a skating rink.

The site is also peppered with mine shafts and is perched on the top of a steep slope overlooking Dudley’s Merryhill Shopping Centre.

Unearthing new challenges
Parkstone’s excavation has produced lots of interesting bits of crockery and Victorian jars and bottles, but the ground on which the company is working has also presented its fair share of problems.

Parkstone has just finished excavating a 6m-deep hold, which will eventually become a two-storey car park beneath the health centre. The edge of the excavation is formed of a wall of contiguous piling. The structure was created using 600mm piles, which are held together with a concrete capping beam.

The structure is propped up with equipment developed by Groundforce Shorco. The excavation for the project was of a reasonably large span, measuring 62m by 57m, the company decided to use its “Super” tube extensions.

The original intention for Brierley Hill was to use raking props, between the wall and the floor of the excavation, but Carillion decided these would cause problems in the general excavation work and in the construction of the basement.

Carillion then considered “flying” props, which would have spanned capping beam to capping beam, but these would have required a central supportive strut, which would have hindered Parkstone as it carried out the groundwork.

The company eventually opted for hydraulic struts supplied by Groundforce. The struts act to take the loads between perpendicular walls. They are attached onto the capping beam of each wall by steel courbels, which were designed by Groundforce and are moulded into the concrete beams.

The company supplied seven MP250 struts for the job, five of which used Groundforce’s new 120mm “Super” tube extensions.

Groundforce designed the struts to cope with large basements, and the longest prop used for Brierley Hill measured 34.8m. James Burchill of Groundforce says Carillion brought the company onboard while the project was still going through the design stages.

“We got involved at the early stage when the drawings had been made,” he says “Carillion has used our software to look at this job and our team was having meetings with them very early on. I went to a meeting 14 months ago; one year before the contract was started and before the subcontractor was chosen.”

Although Parkside is now working at the bottom of a 6m-deep hole in the ground, the struts high above the contractors’ heads propping up the wall were at ground level when they were attached to the capping beams.

Turning plans into reality
Burchill says designing the steel courbels into the capping beams is an exact science. “It’s very critical to get the courbels right,” he says. “The tolerances are measured in millimetres and can affect the performance of the strut throughout the job. If they’re not straight, the strut won’t sit straight. That will affect what the strut can do.”

The longer struts look skew-whiff with a slight bend upwards in the middle. Burchill explains this is to take into account the downward drag on the struts as they span longer distances.

“The longer props are put together with a 5o cambering,” he says. “On the long spans, the weight will make it sag in the middle, so a 5o camber will keep it level.”

The longest support on this job is 34.8m, although Burchill says the company has spanned 43m with no central support.

He says the removal of a central support from the job saves the contractor a lot of time in the early stages of the job.

“This caused problems with the construction process because the contractors had to work around it,” says Burchill. “The props are all now in the air. It’s a cost saving for the contractor, probably into double figures of weeks on the job.”

Keeping the props above ground in order to let the contractors get on with their work is especially important in jobs such as high-rise city centre buildings. Burchill says city centre developers are warming to the idea of designing basements into their buildings.

“This is valuable building method in city centres where people are going deeper with their piling in order to build higher,” he says. “Basement construction is more popular because of the high land prices and these require greater propping to build.”

Parkstone has now excavated more than 21,000m2 of Victorian landfill and reached the lowest point of the job. The company will now build back upwards and construct the walls for the basement. Although, as B&E went to press, Carillion had yet to appoint a contractor for the building’s five-storey concrete frame, it is understood Parkside was one of the companies in the running for the job.

Foundations for the future
Groundforce is onsite at Brierley Hill for between 20 and 25 weeks. Burchill says the company is looking forward to taking its props onto similarly challenging projects.

“The first time we used them we wondered whether we would have another job suitable for them,” he says. “But now we’re getting involved at the early stages and getting some very positive feedback from contractors.”

Meanwhile, Carillion is looking to build on its success with DIL and has bids for more health service work in the area, including one in Wolverhampton.

With two successful projects for DIL in the area and with the tricky Brierley Hill project now underway, the company is in a good position to gain more LIFT work. And with support from innovative companies such as Groundforce, constructing for the public sector looks like it is in very good health indeed.

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