330,000 of Precast Vertical Drain
As part of its capacity expansion project, Brisbane Airport initiated the construction of an additional runway. Menard Bachy, the Menard subsidiary in Australia, worked in a joint venture to supply and install prefabricated vertical drains for the project, which required dredging and backfill. 330,000 drains with lengths ranging from 16 to 40 meters were installed in 17 areas covering a total of 65 hectares. With 8.2 million linear meters of prefabricated vertical drains, the project is the largest of this type ever carried out in Australia. The technique was chosen as the most efficient for the runway construction in order to accelerate the consolidation of saturated soils and settlement of the dredged sand platform (time reduced from five years to three). The project was completed three weeks ahead of the six-month schedule and logged more than 40,000 hours of work without a single lost-time accident.
