Milestone for State Highway 1 rebuild

Tuesday, 15 August 2017

The quake triggered tens of thousands of landslides, and caused the closure of a section of State Highway 1 for more than a year.

For the first time since the earthquake, road crews working to re-open State Highway 1 have access all along the coastal route.

The last time anyone drove around Ohau Point was nearly a year ago, before the earthquake brought down thousands of tonnes of rock on the highway.

But that all changed on Monday, when crews working from the south and north converged in the middle to open up an access track around the base of the point.

A couple of slips still remain along the coast, and access around Ohau Point is limited to excavators, but nonetheless the 'viable link' has been described as a major milestone.

**READ MORE:

The new access track at the base of Ohau Point, from which will excavators will construct a safer track higher up.

* Rock solid nerves: Ohau Point abseilers tackle massive mesh mission

* Six months on, NCTIR's road and rail rebuild on target

A 3D model of how Ohau Point looked last December.

* Earthquake-damaged State Highway 1 expected to be 'fully functional' in time for Christmas**

Transport Minister Simon Bridges said the achievement would help speed up the work to get SH1 open to the public by Christmas.

Abseilers working for the North Canterbury Transport Infrastructure Recovery alliance work to secure Ohau Point, north of Kaikoura.

'Construction crews now have access to the entire stretch of the coastal corridor north of Kaikoura which will greatly speed up the reinstatement of this important route,' he said.

North Canterbury Transport Infrastructure Recovery (NCTIR) teams had cleared seven of the 10 major slips that buried parts of the highway and railway line north of Kaikoura.

A NCTIR spokesman said every day more than 200 people worked north of the town, where more than 800,000 cubic metres of material had been shifted since the earthquake.

The two slips at site one, 104 and 153 metres tall, took five months and 10,000 truckloads to remove all the material, a New Zealand Transport Agency spokeswoman said.

She said an estimated 85 per cent of slip material had been cleared north of Kaikoura to date.

But getting access around Ohau Point, the largest and most technically challenging slip, has always been the sticking point.

During the 7.8-magnitude earthquake more than 100,000 cubic metres of rock and debris slipped down the cliff face, burying the highway below.

To make it safe for ground crews, abseilers working at the top of the bluff bolted on 4500 square metres of steel ring net - the largest rockfall drape in New Zealand.

They are now working to cover the ring net, and the lower uncovered section of Ohau Point, with mesh, covering a total area of some 9000 square metres.

NCTIR coastal route realignment construction manager David McGoey described the access track as a working platform, one that would be used by excavators to form a safer track some 4 metres higher for light vehicles.

However, having any kind of access around the point was a big deal, as it meant machinery could be transferred from sites south of Ohau to slip seven, just north of the point.

'It's the first time there's been a viable link for SH1, even though the only thing we can track across are excavators,' he said.

'For the first time we can transfer a 50-tonne excavator from site six over to site seven. Whereas previously we would have had to have an eight or nine-hour journey around.'

It also meant road crews based in Blenheim, who faced a 90-minute journey to sites just north of Ohau, could be based in Kaikoura, he said.

NCTIR earthworks manager Mike Reilly said having access around Ohau Point would make it far quicker to get machinery.

'It's the last point in the entire network north of Kaikoura where we didn't have a connection around, and now we've got restricted access,' he said.

'There's been a lot of work to get it here, so it is a milestone.'