The Challenge
The construction of the Christchurch Adventure Park which included a chairlift, 4 ziplines, a hospitality village and a wide network of bike trails took place over 8 months during 2016. Completing the planned 20 month build in just 8 months was an ambitious task and HGM were excited to be contracted to work alongside other main contractors to help meet this tight deadline.
The Solution
HGM’s wide variety of specialised plant and equipment, along with its experience it working in steep and rocky terrain made us the ideal candidate to help on a range of projects throughout the build including:
- Trail clearing and pre shaping, installing culverts and water controls
- Constructing 4wd tracks to chairlift and zip line tower sites
- Rock fall mitigation
- Drilling, breaking and excavation of chairlift tower foundations and installation of steel reinforcement cages and form work
- Placing 220m3 of concrete into chairlift foundations by helicopter
- Managing helicopter operations to string zip lines
- Construction of zip line launch decks
Aside from the deadline, one of the biggest challenges of the project was accessing the foundation and track sites while keeping the environmental impact to a minimum. A high level of planning, innovation and quality assurance was required in order to ensure work was carried out in accordance with specified plans and within resource consent conditions.
Following the devastating fires in the port hills which caused significant damage to the Adventure Park, HGM was contracted to rebuild the zip lines. This involved designing and building a hydraulic excavator mounted cable drum roller to safely wind up existing zip line cables so that the zip line towers could then be removed and re-galvanised. The zip line anchors were then retested and the towers reinstated with a new launch deck built for zip 2.