Dunns Creek Irrigation Dam

Location: Ringarooma | Tasmania

Dunns Creek Dam is an initiative of Tasmanian Irrigation and forms part of the State government’s aspirations to see Tasmania achieve maximum agricultural capacity.

In collaboration with Shaw Contracting, Geoton and IPD Consulting we collectively in our fields of expertise won the tender for the Dunns Creek Dam. A 600,000 cubic metre earth fill wall that will provide 6000mL of reliable water storage to North East Tasmania. With a $10 million budget the wall is 20 metres high and over 500 metres long and construction will take approximately 18 months to complete.

Our preliminary role consisted of detailed modelling of the structure to determine the feasibility of the engineers design strategies and the availability of natural materials for construction.

The site is a mixture of heavy rainforest, plantation and farmland pasture and for the most part could not be accessed by conventional surveying techniques until clearing was complete. The modelling was performed using remote sensing data sets obtained by airborne laser ranging techniques. The data sets tested the full power of our software resources.

As construction commenced, our team provided the set out support that enabled Shaw Contracting to keep their machinery running efficiently and without delays. The set out tasks were often simple: clearing lines, batter stakes to enable construction and excavation to commence and establishment of site control to enable on board machine control to be integrated with our models.

Once the site was fully established we assisted the Shaw team to automate their operations with machine control data sets and independent checking. 12 months into the project our role has changed to a supervisory one where we maintain complete records of the excavations, perform acquisition boundary surveys, as constructed records and ongoing design as limitations in the original remotely surveyed data sets are exposed. In the coming months the river will be diverted into the now operational pipeline and then the real pressure starts. The magnitude of the project is best emphasised by the photographic record and can only be best described as one of our dam finest achievements.

This project brought together 6ty˚ services including Surveying & Engineering.

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