Thursday 9 June 2016

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

We had a wonderful presentation in our class today as a follow-up to our "Working Waterfront" field trip to the harbour last week. Today we had a rep from Vancouver Pile Driving who came and explained the work they do in building bridges, docks, cruise ship and ferry terminals, etc.


We went right past their drydock and dock space when we toured the harbour last week, but it was great to learn more about this company and the kind of work they do.

Their representative is a civil engineer, who explained how everything they need to build with, from steel pipe, to gravel, to concrete arrives at their site in North Vancouver by truck, and is then unloaded by a gantry crane so that the building materials can be barged to where they need to be, or in some cases so they can build a structure right in their own dry dock.



One of the more interesting projects VanPile built was the floating bridge across Kelowna Lake in 2008. The William R. Bennett bridge is a floating bridge, with all the concrete floats built by VanPile, and anchored to the bottom of the lake with cables and anchors, and a minimum number of piles. These steel piles were driven down to a depth of 30m to 50m below the bottom of the lake to ensure stability.


Students got to ask questions afterwards, and there was a good deal of excitement evident from the number of questions the representative had to field! We were fortunate to be able to learn such unique perspectives about our North Shore shoreline. 

...And we were given Vancouver Pile Driving ball caps!

All decked out with our VanPile ball caps!

Thank you to the Working Waterfront Alliance!