Enabling Southbank Place

Overview
Source Design Services have had a long term advisory contract with Canary Wharf Group at the Southbank Project with Source Utility Manager embedded with the Canary Wharf Contracting team for over 18 months.
This has led to the appointment of Source as the contractor to manage and deliver all the utilities in Chicheley Street, a high profile road leading to the London Eye outside Waterloo Station.
The relationship that Martin has built with the local TFL representatives and utilities companies are illustrative of what can happen in a collaborative working environment.
Source have managed to reduce the utility programme by 60 weeks to 12 weeks and have reduced the overall utility costs by 45% by implementing a multi-utility approach. SDS have been asked by TFL to provide a case study of the project so that the collaborative nature of the scheme can be used as a template for all future complex utility schemes.

The challenge
In September 2017 Source Design Services will be carrying out street works to connect utilities to Southbank Place. These works will be taking place on Chicheley Street.
Usually utility providers would undertake their own works with no co-ordination and as is often the case, would result in the same stretch of road being dug up multiple times. Had each utility company acted independently, the duration of works would have taken approximately 68 weeks and caused severe disruption to Chicheley Street including road closures.

The Solution
We have worked extremely hard with our contractors Source Design Services to co-ordinate the utility companies operations and mitigate the impact on our neighbours, and are pleased to say have managed to reduce operations to a time frame of 12 weeks.
Chicheley Street is a main corridor for many buried utilities feeding local residents and businesses. To maintain operations and future-proof the existing utilities infrastructure under the road, every utility will need to be diverted.
There will be no road or lane closures or diversions; we will be reducing lane width but maintaining 2-way traffic at all times. SDS will saw-cut the surface of the road and lift the concrete out in sections instead of breaking it out. The trench will be created using Vacuum Excavation.
The advantage of this technique is all excavated materials are lifted into a vacuum sealed unit enabling materials to be reused elsewhere (zero to landfill), without displacing mud onto the surrounding carriageway. This process also creates no dust and actually filters air passing through it to -5 microns (equivalent of fresh air).
The machine itself is also acoustically soundproofed to further minimise noise. The Traffic Marshall will be monitoring noise levels throughout each day and should trigger levels be reached, will have works ceased until the issue is resolved. Maintaining a 2-way flow of traffic will also have the benefit of not increasing vehicle emissions