The
Challenge

A functioning power station supplying 40% of Melbourne’s electricity required roof and wall cladding removed and replaced from its rising conveyors that house two enormous conveyor belts bringing coal from the crusher house up to the boilers.

These structures are unusual in every way, a virtual tunnel-shed on stilts. Only 8 metres wide and 6 metres high but 350 metres long and sitting on stilts about 15 metres off the ground. The client proposed that a full-face scaffold would be required for the entire external walls of the structure. This would have been both colossal and extremely expensive.

The
Solution

Korex designed a scaffold to be placed inside the conveyor building which straddled each of the two conveyors. The scaffold ran the entire length of the structure but because it sat inside, not outside, it only needed to be five metres high and 8 metres wide. We placed the scaffold work platform at just 1 metre below the roof.

This allowed roof panels to be removed from the safe deck of the platform and for the replacement sheets to be easily managed with the roof plumbers fixing into surfaces at their own waist height avoiding any strain injuries. Additionally, it allowed us to separate the works area from the conveyors with an impervious layer to ensure no fragments of asbestos could fall into the conveyor’s coal loads.

The
Outcome

This innovative option meant, that for lower cost, the cladding works could proceed with no interruption to the operation of both conveyors.