Client: Christchurch City Council

Duration: Two years

Background 

Earthquake damage to land and infrastructure alongside the Heathcote River has led to increase severity of flooding in the catchment area.

The Upper Heathcote Storage Optimisation project’s overall outcomes are to provide a flood management control system for the Heathcote storage basins to reduce flooding for lower Heathcote. To maximise the benefits provided by the control gates, a control system and resilient communication network was needed to communicate between the downstream river level RTU sites and the flood  basin RTU sites. This puts in place critical infrastructure needed to allow greater control of the release of water into the downstream rivers and will help significantly reduce serious flooding.

Delivery Solution

Downer’s specialist Automation and Communications team developed a radio and network design by holding design workshops [with the Christchurch City Council (CCC)] at our testing facility in Christchurch. We created a [digital?] replica of the complete radio network and SCADA base server and application where all designers could test their designs in a real  environment, as well as have input from the customer. The radio and network architecture was designed with redundancy to provide a resilient communications foundation that can be scaled out in future to include all CCC RTU sites.

We then installed new communications masts, new microwave communications backhaul radios, new UHF multipoint base radios, three new water level RTU sites, modifications to basin control panels, PLC installations and all EICA and SCADA development and deployment for these systems. This was all completed without disruption to in-production systems. This meant we could fully stress-test the system in its final physical location without interruption. This gave the client confidence as they could see it and test it themselves exactly as it would be after cut-in but without the risks of connecting to production systems.

The network is now in production and the Client is underway migrating existing sites onto the new system.

Outcome

Our quality assurance processes, multifaceted delivery team, capability, and experience across the two specialist disciplines of automation and telecommunications enabled proactive collaboration with Christchurch City Council to achieve the best possible outcomes for the Project, enabling the community it serves to thrive.