AR Demolition used a floating bridge made entirely from standard scaffold to complete the demolition of the Hams Hall Bridge over the River Tame in Birmingham, England, U.K.
The final stage of the complex bridge removal required the brick pier in the middle of the river to be broken out and removed. AR demolition approached the team at ScaffFloat who had already worked on the project providing floating access for the main bridge removal.
The brief was to provide floating access for a nine tonne, long-reach machine to track out from the bank and remove the pier. To add to the challenge, there was very limited access to the river and low overhead power cables prevented the use of a crane to lift in the pontoon sections.
The ScaffFloat team developed a concept and then asked Richter to develop a full design with a Cat 2 check to asses the structure, buoyancy, minimum freeboard and stability. The modular pontoon that consisted of three eight-meter long, four-meter wide modules that were built with standard 450- mm lattice beams, 13-foot scaffold tube and 0.5-cubic mm ScaffFloats. Weighing only 1.2 tonnes each, they could be lifted and launched with a 20-tonne swing shovel that tracked down the bank to the river’s edge. Once afloat, the three pontoon modules were connected together with scaffold and a set of 750-mm Apollo beams were added to complete the floating bridge. Finally, a double layer of scaffold boards was added to make up the deck.
Paul Boddy from Richter said, “We’ve worked with ScaffFloat over the last three years assisting with schemes for access, moving and storing materials, floating welfare facilities and lifting operations. With the knowledge and expertise, we had the confidence to help Toby with this next logical way of using ScaffFloat for plant operations.”
This is the first time a floating bridge has been made with the ScaffFloat system and marks another step forward in the capabilities of the system, proving it can deal with significant payload and heavy plant.
“The solution was delivered by working in partnership with local scaffold contractor, Midlands Scaffolding, who assisted with materials and labor,” said Ben Ekins, Richter’s contracts director. “We’ve been providing scaffold access on the Hams Hall demolition project from the start, and this included two ScaffFloat pontoons that we provided with ScaffFloat to give access to the bridge during the demolition. We are always trying to come up with innovative solutions to our customers problems and it was great to be able to help solve the last piece in the puzzle by building a floating bridge from scaffold for the pier removal.’’
Reprinted from Marine Construction Magazine Issue V, 2023.
