SOCOTEC provides ground investigation services for Thames Tideway Tunnel project in London, UK

KEY INFORMATION

Project name: Thames Tideway Project
Date: 2017
Length: Project completion expected in 2024
Client: CVB joint venture (Costain, VINCI Construction Grands Projects and Bachy Soletanche)
Location: East London, UK

PROJECT SUMMARY

SOCOTEC provided CVB with ground investigation services at five infrastructure sites to support work on the eastern section of the Thames Tideway Tunnel project. The UK water industry’s biggest ever infrastructure project, this super sewer tunnel will be 25km long and located 65m below the surface.

PROJECT DETAILS

SOCOTEC supported CVB in identifying optimal construction solutions at the site of the Chambers Wharf shaft – a key part of the infrastructure project.

Partially located on recently cleared brownfield land as well as on the adjacent river foreshore, the site potentially featured a range of soil strata and surface deposit types, as well as buried structures. To understand ground conditions prior to construction, SOCOTEC provided a team of ground investigation experts that undertook fast and accurate core drilling services, in-situ testing and laboratory analysis.

Of particular importance to CVB was the drilling of 100m deep chalk boreholes in order to identify deep chalk fissures to inform its design. The chalk cores were drilled using SOCOTEC’s drilling rigs. Throughout the project, SOCOTEC worked closely with both CVB and its designer, Mott MacDonald, to relay the findings of its core analysis in real time. In doing so, both organisations were able to work together to devise and undertake additional tests or deploy new testing methodologies that provided CVB with the required knowledge about the nature of the ground beneath the infrastructure site.

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Talk to our experts

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Norman SLEETH

Commercial Director and Managing Director, SOCOTEC UK

Commercial Director and Managing Director, SOCOTEC UK

norman.sleeth@esg.co.uk
"[Chambers Wharf] was a truly complex site, and it was crucial that we had the right consultants working with us to get the job done to the precise standards required. The SOCOTEC team had an impressive wealth of experience carrying out ground investigations on challenging projects that made them the ideal choice for this project."

Tim Newman, Geotechnical Engineer, CVB.

"SOCOTEC worked closely with our team from the very beginning and its experts really impressed us with their hard work, care and attention to detail. The SOCOTEC team was integral in ensuring the smooth running of many parts of the project. It was great to see how well the logging of the site’s stratigraphy had been carried out, with the key fossils identified to support the team’s interpretations. We were really impressed by the team’s flexibility and versatility when developing additional tests to study newly-identified anomalies.”

Matt Bellhouse, CVB Lead Geologist

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