At McElligotts, our team is regularly asked to complete projects in remote and hard to access areas, requiring a lot of skill, logistical work, and no small degree of ingenuity. Today, we’re going to look at a selection of our projects – some of which have been completed, others are still ongoing – that have presented unique challenges in accessing and executing. We hope these examples show the great lengths that our experienced team will go to in order to provide protective coating, abrasive blasting and other remedial construction services.
Westgate Bridge
The Westgate Bridge is one of the most iconic industrial landmarks in Victoria, and over the past two years, our team have been hard at work completing the monumental task of repainting the complete 60,000 square meter central section of this 2.5km long structure. At its highest peak, the bridge is over 55m above the Yarra River, and our team had to work on access platforms suspended from the bridge’s underside structure in order to prepare and apply the 55,000 litres of paint that were used. Each platform was fully dehumidified to enable work through low temperatures and high humidity from rain, which enabled work to continue regardless of extreme elements and conditions,
Kangaroo Valley Pipeline
This was a project that the McElligotts team completed back in 2013. It involved our team having to completely strip and reline the interior of the 1.6km long Kangaroo Valley Pipeline. The pipe itself was only 2.6m in diameter , making for a claustrophobic working environment for our team and equipment. But what made this project even more challenging was that the pipe only had two access points.- one at the top of the pipeline and one at the bottom 1.6 kms away This made moving our workers, robotic blasting and painting equipment lighting and vacuum system in and out of the pipeline safely quite the hurdle.
Goods Island Lighthouse
This is an ongoing project taking place on Goods Island in the Torres Strait. Situated over 30km from the northern tip of Cape York. In fact, you would only have to travel a further 140km (roughly equivalent to the distance between the centre of Melbourne and the centre of Bendigo) before you hit the mainland of Papua New Guinea. This is to say that Goods Island is a small, remote island that isn’t easy to access. However, the lighthouse present on the island does provide essential guidance to the ships that go through the Torres Strait, and our team was asked to provide remedial services to this 135-year-old structure. In fact, this project’s location was so remote, that all of our team and equipment had to be flown in by helicopter.
These are just a handful of the projects that McElligotts has worked on in difficult to access locations. Learn more about our project here, and get in touch to discuss partnering with McElligotts on your next project.