Mark Armstrong and Nigel Griffith attended Auckland Motorways recent ‘Safe Working on the Road Induction,’ a mandatory workshop required by the Auckland Motorway Alliance for anyone who has to work on the motorway network.

Mark thought the content was excellent and detailed, “There was time to discuss issues and examples raised by attendees as a group, providing answers on what to do and what not to do in the future.”

Key areas covered included Health and Safety responsibilities both as an employer and as an employee; qualifications, powers and responsibilities of the STM; emergency incident procedures; Traffic Management Plans and why they are important; minimum levels of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) required; garments and types of flashing beacons allowed; safety of plant left on site or on the road side out of hours; mobile and special operations and Operational Requirements and Auckland Traffic Operations Control ( ATOC)

In early July, Thomas Harhoff and Peter Sansom attended the  combined International Federation of Municipal Engineering (IFME) World Congress and the Institute of Public Works Engineering Australia (IPWEA) International Conference.

Covering asset management, road and bridge technology, water management and sustainable practices, among other topics, the conference brought together speakers from all over the world.

Peter Sansom found the paper on bridge rehabilitation and maintenance by Barry Wright and Rudolph Kotze extremely valuable. The paper outlined potential risk-based approaches for key elements of the asset management process for bridges and looked at important risk areas together with their identification and mitigation to ensure limited resources are directed to maintenance and strengthening activities that will maximise the investment return for the asset owner. The most important lesson Peter took away from this was, ‘sweat the small stuff; if you can manage one small component of an asset, you can extend the life of that structure.’

The stand-out sessions for Thomas were Australian, Adrian Sykes’s, discussion of Water Sensitive Urban Design in the city of Charles Sturt where their primary objectives are flood mitigation and stormwater reuse; and Nick Meeten’s paper on the energy potential in wastewater. With a temperature range between 10 and 15 degrees Celsius year round, wastewater has the capacity to provide 10 to 20 percent of the heating and cooling needs for commercial buildings within a city, with greater efficiency than current solutions.