On a quiet Sunday, a 90-tonne crane squeezed through a narrow corridor between busy buildings, successfully completing a high-risk roof replacement and turning it into a clean, carefully controlled success story.
But this wasn’t at one of our usual mine sites; this project was somewhere quite different.
RTW recently completed a major upgrade at an abattoir, removing old non-compliant roof sheeting and lifting a new steel roof structure into place inside one of the site’s most tightly packed areas.
Access quickly became the biggest challenge. The building sits between other structures and workshops, leaving only a narrow corridor that barely accommodates the crane required for every major lift.
“At peak, we had about 20 people on the job, and the trickiest part by far was getting safe access to the roof in such a tight space,” RTW Project Manager Clinton Garnie said.
“The scaffolding installation was complex, and every lift had to be planned down to the last detail.”
A major milestone was the successful removal of the roof without airborne contamination. Dust-monitoring equipment was used throughout the works to maintain strict control of pollutants and protect everyone on site.
Clinton said the result was a credit to the wider team.
“The input from people already working on site helped shape how we executed the job. Seeing everyone from home base to site pull together to deliver it safely and to spec was genuinely rewarding,” he said.
The project reached practical completion in mid-December, five days ahead of the cutoff date, under conditions that left no room for error.
The site, built in the 1950s, was found to have non-compliant roof sheeting and gutters on the slaughter floor.
A plan was developed to remove the existing material and raise the roof height over the existing timber trusses, creating space to relocate process piping and equipment to the new roof structure.
RTW was engaged to deliver the full scope of works, from detailing and fabricating the new steelwork to installing the roof and cladding.
The team also installed four new underground sumps with drainage lines to handle additional runoff from the new roof, supplied all cranes and scaffolding, and removed and disposed of the old roofing in accordance with government regulations.