SAICE WC Branch The South African Institution of Civil Engineering Western Cape Branch

MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIRMAN

Sadly, in June we said final goodbyes to Harry Mills (one of the Masterminds of Tony Murray’s Megastructures and Masterminds) and Cedric Barker (a regular at our Branch Lecture series). Former Provincial Roads Engineer John de Kock (not a SAICE member) died in July and on the 24th July, our 2013 SAICE President (111th), Peter Kleynhans. For more than 30 years Peter served on several SAICE divisional committees, was chairman of the Institution’s Finance and Administration Committee, a member of SAICE Council and he served on the Executive Board in various capacities. Derek Visser of TNPA has died very recently. Our deepest sympathy to all their families.

Media reports and communication from the CEO: SAICE dealt with the legal challenge by most of the Voluntary Associations – with SAICE the leading player – against the current ECSA Council and the Minister of Public Works. The date for the Court case is yet to be determined. Unfortunately, the decision by ECSA to change the tried and tested process of reviewing professional registration in the engineering field is impacting the industry.
Up until 2016, the registration process was as follows: (i) On application, the ECSA Administration sent the candidate’s application to at least 3 members of the Professional Advisory Committee (PAC) to conduct a desktop experience appraisal; (ii) Once accepted, a professional interview was arranged by SAICE with two experienced professionals from SAICE’s database; and (iii) PAC reviewed the application (and Interviewers’ report) and submitted its recommendation to the Registration Committee for approval.
The system for technicians and technologists differed with some candidates being considered for interviews whilst others were assessed without interviews. PAC members and interviewers were identified by the Voluntary Associations and recommended to ECSA’s Council for appointment.
Since April 2017, the entire process is managed solely by ECSA. The assessors, interviewers and reviewers, who must be in possession of an engineering professional registration, are sourced by ECSA. The process is as follows: (i) ECSA sends the candidate’s application to four Experience Appraisal Assessors to conduct a desk top assessment; (ii) ECSA sets up the interview with the candidate with two reviewers; and (iii) The application is then moderated by a panel of ECSA-appointed moderators for recommendation of approval of professional registration to ECSA. (Viola explained the process on 19 July). Voluntary Associations have no role to play. SAICE members need not be discouraged from making their own decisions to be Assessors, Interviewers or Reviewers. It should be noted that not all professionally registered persons are members of the Voluntary Associations.

BRANCH BUZZZZING: events you may have missed–

21 June and James Melvill told us more of the “Engineering Solutions for Crossrail at Bond Street Station”. James’s degree is from Durban, his Masters from Stellenbosch. He spent 5 years with contractors, and then 5 years with WSP on Bond Street Station, where WSP were overall managers with 7 different contracts to keep in line. A National Monument right next door, twin 260m long platform tunnels, to be bored, piles 30 to 40m deep, construction to within 4m of the crown of the Jubilee Line tunnel below them, ambient-noise-level –5 decibels prescribed, a TBM that couldn’t make a dent in concrete, and a very confined site at ground level…. You start to get the picture? Top-down construction with support walls built under existing slabs (with self-compacting concrete pumped into the base of the wall) and plunge columns (I found the Balfour description better when I looked up that one) among solutions along the way. A client making changes along the way helped, of course! (It helped the client, with property value doubled as a result of the changes). Demob. in September 2012, with all incentives achieved. First trains due in the tunnels this time next year.

19 July: Viola Milner presented to a full house at the Athenaeum on the new ECSA Registration System and mentoring thereon. Obviously it was a topic that appealed to a good spread of our members. It was great to see young, old and in-betweens attending. Viola is soon to register and is passionate about helping others as well and provided a thorough review of the process with which she has now become thoroughly familiar. She gave advice to Mentors, Mentees and how to overcome the generation gap and highlighting differing points of view. A comparison was presented between the new and old processes and guidelines on how to comply with the new and structure your reports. One major change is the omission in the process of the essay writing and a “Skype” interview process. The presentation is available on our web site and worth a read and is full of useful info. The evening ended with some debate on how to represent yourself at the interview with advice from the floor ranging from promoting yourself confidently to letting the interview process run its course by allowing the interviewees to ascertain that you are ready for registration. Thanks to Viola for a thorough and incredibly useful presentation.

7 August: JSD 80th Celebration and the ISE Presidential Visit. For those at UCT’s Chem Engi Seminar Room privileged to listen to ISE President Ian Firth on Engineered Elegance – the Art of Bridge Design, this was a real treat. He started by quoting Marcus Vitruvius, the famous Ancient Roman architect, who believed that an architect should focus on three central themes when preparing a design for a building: firmitas (strength), utilitas (functionality), and venustas (beauty). The bridge designer must deal with strength and stability, buildability and maintainability, economy and much more, but should not neglect the venustas, with scale and proportion, light and shade and the contextual being of great moment.

One of the earliest examples he noted of the latter was the Great Belt East Bridge in Denmark, where the architect had in his office a multitude of models of the towers, with different numbers of cross-members at different levels, where he’d come to realize how important such things could be. He also liked the anchorages of the catenaries, seeing them as beautiful examples of form following function (tremendous forces to be coped with without overturning or over-stressing the foundation or being overly bulky). Interesting: the deck is only laterally supported at the towers, not in the vertical.

Other beautiful bridges included the Sunniberg (right) and Salginatobel (further right) and the Gateshead Millenium (far right), with his own Swansea Sail Bridge (below, left) not looking too shoddy.

Location of the Sail Bridge bridge marked in red, see map on right hand side. The clients started off wanting to have it further north, delivering traffic through the parking area of a supermarket, but the Engineers engineered a re-think.

Mr Firth admitted to being influenced by Calatrava but said that Calatrava was not always practical, claiming that the Alamillo Bridge, for example, was not to be easily maintained. He works with architects, but only a very select few. Inevitably, Millau Viaduct had to come up – he seemed to have divided loyalties on this, recognizing the Engineer (Michel Virlogeux) whose idea it was, but equally impressed by British architect Norman Foster’s role.
Mr Firth showed a clip of the Millenium Bridge (near the Tate Modern) on the day it was opened and closed, with the people first staggering around because of the wobble and then trying to synchronise their efforts.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAXVa__XWZ8). His firm, Flint & Neill, subsidiary of COWI International, was called in by Arup (who designed it) to fix what Arup claimed was an unknown effect at the time (not true). He’d been on the Boomslang in Kirstenbosch and confessed to having tried to get it to misbehave (No comment from Engineer Henry Fagan, in the audience).

16 August: instead of stainless steel we heard about Cured-in-Place Pipe lining (CIPP) and other trenchless technologies for the rehabilitation of pipeline systems and instead of Craig Bennett, Michiel (Amie) Colyn was our informant. CIPP – a polyester or glass fibre non-woven fabric (Kevlar: only Germany) with a resin impregnation, with structural strength (up to 100MPa!) – can be used in water supply, but only with epoxy resin. In sewers, curing can be ambient (only with chemical curing), hot water, steam or UV light (a train of lights moves down the tunnel), the latter having the advantage of the process being able to be stopped if there is a hitch, re-starting after the problem has been overcome. However, where deformation exceeds 10% pipe cracking or other methods must be used.