Bridges we love | Waikanae River

🌹 Roses are red, violets are blue, Anton Kivell, this one’s for you 💘

We couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate Valentines Day, than to hear from our Senior Structural Engineer, Anton about his first true love.

Just 60km north of Wellington on the sometimes sunny Kāpiti Coast, please allow us to introduce the Waikanae River Bridge.

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WAIKANAE RIVER BRIDGE | KĀPITI COAST

“They say you always remember your first, and for me this was my first bridge.

Working closely with Ronald Wessel, Jamil Khan, and Geoff Brown, we navigated an array of challenges to deliver an innovative design for the 182m long bridge that carries SH1 across the Waikanae River.

It turned out to be a bridge of many firsts:

✔ 1st 3.0m dia bored piles in NZ with DH40 hoops

✔ 1st 1800 Super-tee’s in NZ

✔ 1st Precast – Post-tensioned crossheads in NZ

The innovations required to get the design to work are now mostly hidden below the ground or in concrete. When you are designing for ground accelerations of 0.74g, 2km from a fault line, in ground that will liquefy to depths of 10-15m, the standard solutions were found to be lacking or prohibitively expensive.

This bridge taught me that doing things because “that’s the way we have always done it” creates false boundaries in engineering. Sometimes we have to dare to push beyond those boundaries. To do this in a meaningful and safe way requires a comprehensive and robust understanding of the fundamental principles of design, not just rules of thumb.

The Waikanae River Bridge on the Kāpiti Expressway will always be a Bridge that I love.”

#WeLoveBridge #Engineering #Infrastructure #StructuralDesign #BridgeConstruction #CivilEngineering #Hoffcon