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Leighton Holdings Quarterly Update 2nd Quarter 28 Eastern Distributor and Cross City Tunnel operations and maintenance unite Leighton Contractors was awarded the contract to operate and maintain the Eastern Distributor in 1999 for a 48 year period. Last year a consortium of Leighton Contractors and ABN AMRO successfully bid for the nearby Cross City Tunnel. The Industrial and Services Division of Leighton Contractors has taken on a 25 year contract to operate and maintain that tunnel. The synergies between the Cross City Tunnel and the Eastern Distributor have led to a merging and rationalisation of management structure. Chris Dando, formerly Manager of Operations and Maintenance at the Cross City Tunnel, is now the Project Manager for Operations and Maintenance at both projects. Chris talks to us about the undertaking. "It was a somewhat challenging transition taking over an operating motorway but we managed to do that quite successfully. "The Eastern Distributor motorway is 6km long and almost 2km of that is a piggy-back tunnel - the south-bound and north-bound lanes sit one on top of the other. The Cross City Tunnel is approximately 2km long, but the whole tunnel network comprises of about 8km when you consider all the on and off ramps. The Eastern Distributor alone has daily traffic averaging between 120,000 and 130,000 vehicles. "We deal with a range of traffic issues every day, keeping minor traffic incidents and breakdowns from escalating into major traffic incidents is the key outcome of our business. That's why the coordination of our patrol crews and the Emergency Services by our control room operators is so important. "After working in a motorway environment for two years I have to say that driver behaviour can be quite amazing. We've had truck drivers ignore height restrictions, a motor cyclist attempt to drive through the tunnel the wrong way but noticed and did a u-turn. Topping that was a car and caravan that did the same thing - but when they tried to u-turn they stopped traffic all together. "We also had 20 police vehicles chasing a car against the flow of traffic, a dog that ran through the full length of the Cross City Tunnel, a homeless person walking against traffic and a drunken reveller who entered the motorway and fell asleep in the middle of the road! Never a dull moment. "An important issue that we deal with is maintaining a healthy tunnel environment. The traffic we move can produce many potentially harmful gases. We monitor these gas levels very, very closely in the tunnels. A range of operational procedures are available to the motorway controllers to deal with any gas levels that may be of concern. "Regular maintenance of the tunnels is equally important for driver safety. It includes wall washing, road surface sweeping, closed-circuit television system inspections (there are 263 cameras over the two motorways), emergency phone system inspections (there are 331 phones in the tunnels), crash barrier replacement and light replacement, and inspection and repairs to the industrial sized fans (127 across the two
Leighton Holdings Quarterly Update 2nd Quarter 29 motorways.) We have over 9,000 lights and 5,000 of those are fluorescent which are replaced every four to five years. "We not only have to take care of the travelling public, we also have a lot of local residents and businesses at both sites to look after. The Cross City Tunnel, in particular, opened when air quality outside the tunnel was a very, very sensitive issue. Consequently an Air Quality Consultative Committee was established to review community concerns. We have to provide a lot of air quality data to the committee and decided an open-book approach best demonstrated that we have nothing to hide as far as maintaining the air quality at Cross City Tunnel. We've had good feedback from this group on the way we deal with a number of air quality issues. "The other big issue for our local residents is noise. We can only do our maintenance at night between the hours of 10.00 pm and 5.00 am and being in the city there are a lot of high rise residents around our two projects. The local residents are very sensitive to any noise at night time. We find that if we give them sufficient notice and keep the noise to a minimum in the early hours, we meet their requirements. "The major goal of the underground motorways is to take traffic off the suburban and city streets. One of the major benefits of motorways is the reduction in traffic fuel consumption and the figure estimated for the Eastern Distributor was a saving of 1.2 million litres per year. "Another issue concerning the environment that most people don't think about is the amount of ground water and salt water seepage that we get in both the vehicle tunnel and ventilation tunnels. This is more pronounced at the Cross City Tunnel where the tunnels are quite deep and sit below the tide line, therefore, we get in excess of 500 tonnes a day. We collect and treat that water in tanks before it is discharged to stormwater drains. Part of that water is actually free of salt and is a valuable resource, so we went through our client to Sydney Council about it. Sydney Council are keen to make use of it and have made it a major component of the City of Sydney's groundwater re-use program. We are currently working with our client and Sydney Council to get this water re-use project up and running. "Traffic management and toll collection are fairly IT based businesses. At the moment the use-bydate of a lot of equipment at Eastern Distributor has been reached and we're undergoing a tolling system upgrade at various levels. The upgrade will bring greater efficiencies. The Cross City Tunnel opened as a cashless tollroad and certainly that will happen in due course at the Eastern Distributor. "Safety on site is critical - an operating motorway is a potentially dangerous environment. We have a lot of remote areas in both these tunnel networks and communications with workers in those areas is important. We have to keep track of who is working where in the tunnel, what work they're doing and when we expect to hear from them. "In addition to meeting forecast returns and safe operation of both sites, success in the short term is achieving steady state operation of the Cross City. As I mentioned before we've only been on site for 3 months. We took it over when it was an operating motorway so getting that site settled down and operating in a more steady state environment is a key short term goal. We had a major planned maintenance shutdown at Cross City soon after we moved in; preparing for that and successfully achieving it, and completing all the scheduled maintenance that was required was a major achievement. "I've found a very positive culture here at the operations and maintenance group at the Eastern Distributor. Some of the people have been here for seven or eight years - that's from the opening of the motorway and there have been a lot of good relationships formed. I see that both in the work environment and socially. Certainly working in this new environment has been a great experience for me. It's only early days but I've got a great team working with me," said Mr Dando.
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