Amey Lagan Roads is this month celebrating another significant milestone on Northern Ireland’s second design build finance and operate scheme.  During January the country’s largest ever highways construction project is coming to the end of its one year defects maintenance agreement by DBFO contractor Lagan Ferrovial.

What has been built for the province as part of DBFO2 at a cost of £250M is 38km of brand new road in three separate schemes. This includes on the A1 over 12km of new road bypassing Newry along with four grade separated junctions which together have completed the upgrade to dual carriageway of route from Belfast to Dublin. And out in the west over 20km of the A4 from Ballygawley to Dungannon has been dualled up to where it meets the M1 motorway to Belfast putting places like Enniskillen in easy commuting distance of the capital.

The schemes have dramatically cut journey times by over 25% in some cases and replaced many at grade crossing points with underpasses or overbridges to enhance safety for road users.

All the new construction projects completed in May 2011 and now the Lagan Ferrovial defects maintainance period is just now coming to an end. This month Amey Lagan Roads will formally embrace the new sections of route into its existing £240M, 30 year DBFO maintenance deal with the Northern Ireland Roads Service for the 125km of M1/A4 and A1 which has been running since 2007.

“The 36 month intensive capital investment programme came in on budget and ahead of time,” says Amey Lagan Roads general manager Damien Toner. As well as successful delivery, the job also serves to underline that within the joint venture there are skills in delivering project finance, he says.  Along with Amey’s roads maintenance private finance deals in Sheffield and Birmingham, the Northern Ireland investment is part of a programme that has delivered capital in difficult economic times. “Amey has demonstrated is can successfully raise project finance in a very restricted funding marketplace,” he says.

For the Lagan Ferrovial contracting team – a combination of Lagan Construction and Ferrovial Agroman - reputation gained on DBFO2 has led to other major joint venture projects like the £10M Aberdeen Airport runway redevelopment and resurfacing and the £103M A8 Belfast to Larne dualling where the joint venture also includes Costain. “Since we came together in 2005, we have had an excellent  track record as a joint venture which we are building on,” says Ferrovial Agroman health, safety, quality and environment director for Northern Ireland Garth Williams.

Lagan Ferrovial prides itself on employing local people he says, something that is continuing in the maintenance phase. Some 700 jobs were created directly and in local companies during construction work on DBFO2 with 75% of subcontractors and suppliers belonging to the local supply chain.

Quality, environment and health and safety are taken very seriously. The joint venture was awarded the trilogy of ISO14001, ISO9001 and OHSAS 18001 within one year of it being formed.

A key success on the environment front was achieving a 92% recycling rate, a significant achievement given that close to 5M.m^³ of earth had to be moved on the job. On the A1 at Cloghogue near Newry the team was rock blasting for six months but 1.2Mt of the waste was crushed and recycled into aggregate for the cement bound material used as foundation for the new carriageway. “This improved the programme significantly,” says Mr Williams. “The Newry job finished four months ahead of schedule with the Belfast to Dublin main line available six months early, significantly redfucing cross border traffic disruption .”

Over on the 20km A4 Dungannon Section Lagan senior project manager George Taggart was faced with shockingly wet summers and appalling ground conditions including three times as much peat as he had been expecting, some of it 20m deep in places. Band drains and surcharging played their part but there was a lot of digging out and the muckshift on this section of DBFO2 amounted to 3.5M.m^³. “But we needed 2.5M.m^³ of fill so we treated as much of the poor ground, onsite  by lime/cement stabilisation and reused it,” Mr Taggart says. 

On the whole job the JV put a lot of effort into considering the travelling public, Mr Taggart says. “We programmed the offline work to create capacity to relieve congestion when on line work was being undertaken.”

The end result of the DBFO capital investment says Mr Toner “is what we believe to be a scheme that is creating a legacy in terms of improving the economy and travel experience of residents, visitors and businesses in Northern Ireland.”

The team

Client: Roads Service Northern Ireland
DBFO client: Amey Lagan Roads
Construction joint venture: Lagan Ferrovial
Maintenance operator: Amey Infrastructure Services
Contractor’s designers: RPS, Arup, WYG, ADS
Client’s representatives: URS, AECOM, Mouchel
DBFO client’s designer: Amey 

PHOTO GALLERY

The A1 bypass for Newry under construction

Constructing a new overbridge on the route between Belfast and Dublin

Construction of overbridges at Hillsborough and Banbridge removed dangerous at grade crossing points on the main A1

Over 14km of the dualling of the A4 between Dungannon and Ballygawley was carried out offline