A stone piling mat has been laid across Everton’s Bramley-Moore Dock site to support the heavy machinery needed to begin foundation drilling in the dock.
Plans at the state-of-the-art waterfront site took a break over the Christmas period, with the club performing a phased return over the past month.
The Blues announced last month the first above-ground work on the foundations for their new stadium had begun, with the first section of the concrete super-structure being erected.
To date, the drilling of some of the 2,500 foundation piles - which are then capped to provide firm foundations for the superstructure - have been restricted to the solid ground on the north and south sides of the site.
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From these pile caps, the first pre-cast elements of the concrete core of the stadium have already begun to emerge on the northern side.
And once the piling mat is laid, in tandem with the completion of existing drilling for the South stand, the heavy machinery can then be moved to within the dock itself.
That came after the announcement that the dock itself had been fully infilled with 480,000 cubic metres of fluidised sand, with the compacting process still continuing across the site.
And now a 300mm-deep covering of recycled stone is currently being rolled out on top of the compacted sand infill to allow the foundation piling to commence within the dock itself.
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The process, which will result in 12,000 cubic metres of stone laid across an area of 40,000 square metres, is expected to take around a month, with piling in the dock set to commence next week.
“The requirements for the piling mat are two-fold; firstly to protect the sand, which is still quite light and easily becomes airborne in high winds, despite the compaction process,” Gerald Knights, Engineering Lead at contract partner Laing O’Rourke, said.
“Secondly, the piling equipment and all the support machinery creates high pressures on the ground - and the last thing we need is the piling rig to tilt over, or sink into the sand.
“The mat ensures we have a stable surface to distribute those forces, and the really good thing, from a sustainability angle, is that the material we are using has all been recycled from across the site.
“That means we can reduce the number of wagon miles on the road, and is far more environmentally friendly than quarrying new material.”
Knights added: “As we complete an area of the piling mat there is a progressive hand-over, so as we complete the final phase of the north stand piling, we can then move into the dock itself from next week and start piling there.
“By that stage, all the piling in the south wharf will also have been completed.
“The mat itself will then stay in place for the duration of the piling process and, when that is complete, we will have to excavate some of the mat to build the pile caps, very similar to the ones we’ve already built in the north and south wharfs.
“Some of that material will then get re-used again, filling out around the pile caps, so again from a sustainability angle we get another use for it.”
