Aurecon engineer wins Women in Construction award

Aurecon Australia's Mairead Hogan wins at the 2013 National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC) NSW Chapter Awards for Excellence.
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The development was funded by the Department of Human Settlements of the Provincial Government of the Western Cape
30 September 2013 – An integrated human settlement development for the City of Mossel Bay, South Africa has received a Special Merit Award from the Southern African Housing Foundation (SAHF) during its 2013 International Conference.
Commencing mid-2008 and completed in August 2012, Aurecon was responsible for all the project management, consulting civil and structural engineering as well as the community liaison, dispute resolution and subsidy application administration for the project. The development was funded by the Department of Human Settlements of the Provincial Government of the Western Cape through state funded programmes and capital contributions by Mossel Bay Municipality.
Great Brak River, a former municipality was merged into the greater Mossel Bay Municipality. Over time, a few densely populated informal settlements (Gauteng, Klipkop, Brandjesnes and Wolwedans) emerged on the periphery of the then formal township area. Suitable land for the further development of formal low cost human settlements is virtually non-existent due to the extremely hilly topography of the area and the very high cost of private land.
Resettlement of the households to housing projects in the distant Mossel Bay was never an option and innovative solutions to the in-situ development challenges had to be found.
The aim of this in-situ incremental upgrading of informal settlement interventions were:
The scope of the development was the provision of 675 fully serviced sites with 40m2 houses (two bedrooms complete with bathroom, solar water geysers and electricity). A full level of municipal services infrastructure was installed and due to the steep slopes and related soil conditions, three foundation typologies had to be designed. They included re-enforced raft foundations on platforms, conventional strip footings with re-enforced plinth walls and rib-and-block floor slabs on columns.
“Extended Public Works Programme (EPWP) principles were employed to the optimum during the development of the services infrastructure and the contractor employed for the construction of the houses made use of local sub-contractors, with batches of houses allocated to these sub-contractors,” said Francois Theron, Project Leader; Land Development Services. “This process resulted in a high level of employment of local people throughout the development period, and building/transferring skills within the community.”
This approach required special measures which had to be instituted to ensure skills development and quality control. Special features of this project included:
Winning this award is a testament to the teamwork portrayed by the Aurecon project team, the Mossel Bay Municipal officials and the funders, the Western Cape Provincial Department of the Human Settlements, under the leadership of Francois Theron.
Aurecon Australia's Mairead Hogan wins at the 2013 National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC) NSW Chapter Awards for Excellence.
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