This award recognises excellence in activities associated with reliable service supply to communities, or the distribution of water, waste, energy (including electricity, gas, oil or coal), communications or community amenities.

Arapuni Dam Foundation Remediation Project
Arapuni Alliance – Brian Perry Civil, Damwatch Services, Mighty River Power and Trevi S.p.A.

Arapuni was a large dam with serious problems. Its rock foundations had major clay-filled fissure zones with the potential to erode out, which could result in an expensive loss of water and foundation pressures high enough to destroy the dam.

Engineers working in the Arapuni Alliance took a careful and effective approach to resolve these issues. First, exploratory drilling mapped the problems and discovered four zones of fractured rock.

The engineers proposed to seal the zones with curtain walls formed by drilling overlapping (secant) holes right down through the dam and backfilling them with concrete while keeping the power station operational. The geotechnical work had unexpected challenges and the impact of a wrong action was potentially disastrous.

In addition, the solution was completely untried on this scale (in weak rock, down to a 90-metre depth) anywhere in the world.
It was truly groundbreaking work.

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