Safety on Site: Diaphragm Wall Construction by Heritage Infraspace

Apart from being the pioneers of diaphragm wall construction for deep basements, what makes Heritage Infraspace Pvt Ltd (HIPL) rank as the one of the top construction company in India is their approach to safety on site. Safety on construction sites protects the workers and keeps the public safe.

The construction sites commissioned to HIPL are typically congested locations in bustling cities with high pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Inadequate safety procedures could lead to mishaps involving construction employees, heavy equipment and onlookers, placing them in severe and sometimes life-threatening danger.

Here are some of the steps HIPL follows, as a responsible diaphragm wall construction company in Ahmedabad, India, to ensure the safety of workers and general people around the site, right from implementing a health, safety and environment plan to an internal checklist of to-dos by the safety team of HIPL.

General Workers’ Safety

Every member on the ground, including the labourers and engineers, is provided with reflective safety jackets, standard safety helmets and safety shoes with steel toes.

Those working in reinforcement get hand gloves, and shoulder pads as they carry heavy and long rods of steel bars and welded wire fabrics.

Welders are provided with a proper faceguard, gloves and safety aprons, to protect them from the sparks flying off the metal during the process.

Teams working with concrete in Diaphragm wall construction are also provided with special gum boots and hand gloves.

Site Safety Protocols

At every HIPL construction project site, a safety officer assists the project manager in implementing safety guidelines and reviewing risk assessment. Together they conduct multiple levels of safety inspections at site on a continuous basis, making on-the-spot corrections.

Before the beginning of any project operations, the safety officer and the project manager conduct a safety meeting with all staff members. This session educates everyone involved in the project about the various steps to be taken to avert any untoward incident that might put anyone in danger or cause loss of property.

Hard Barrication is done prior to construction commencement. Clear and visible signages like Deep Excavation, Non PPE Zone, Active Drilling in Process, Electrical DG Set Zone, Cage Making in Progress etc are placed to ensure site identification.

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HIPL X Central Vista: Revamping India’s Administrative Capital for the Future

The Client – Government of India, Larsen & Toubro

The Central Vista, India’s central administrative area located near Raisina Hill, New Delhi. The area was originally designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and Sir Herbert Baker during British colonial rule and was retained by the Government of India after independence.

Scheduled between 2020 and 2024, the Central Vista Redevelopment project aims to revamp a 3 km (1.9 mi) long Rajpath between Rashtrapati Bhavan and India Gate, convert North and South Blocks to publicly accessible museums by creating a new common Central Secretariat to house all ministries, a new Parliament building near the present one with increased seating capacity for future expansion, new residence and office for the Vice-President and the Prime Minister near the North Block and South Block and convert some of the older structures into museums.

A set of ten doughnut-shaped buildings on four plots as Secretariat will be built on either side of Rajpath. The height of all the buildings will be less than 42 meters (height of India Gate) and they will have 7 floors. Exteriors of all buildings will be similar to surrounding Lutyens buildings and they will be connected to each other and to the Delhi Metro network by electric people-movers in underground ways and overground buses.

In 2021, infrastructure company Larsen & Toubro Limited was awarded the contract for the construction as well as maintenance of the first three buildings of the Common Central Secretariat under the Central Vista Redevelopment project by the Central Public Works Department.

Projects awarded to HIPL

Under L&T, HIPL was awarded the projects for diaphragm wall construction and Soil Anchoring for the Central Secretariat building in the Parliament Complex.

The concrete diaphragm walls are being built in a periphery of 1500 running mts. The diaphragm wall ranges between 600 to 800 mm, and they are being constructed 20 mts and above.

The soil anchoring was done with the standard distance of 2.5 meters between each struts and anchors.

Challenges faced

The safety standards for the entire project is very high and its maintenance requires meticulous planning from every department.

One of the initial challenges was to ensure the smooth process of the security verification of every member involved in the project.

Secondly, the team had to be very cautious with all forms of excavations and drilling activities, as a lot of the surrounding structures have a historical significance and cannot afford even minimal damage.

In the midst of the Heritage Infraspace diaphragm wall construction activity, the team of engineers discovered water flushing outside, during the anchoring activity. This was plugged using our water stoppers.

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Everything You Need To Know About Building Concrete Diaphragm Walls

Right from metro rail construction to new age super structures like towering residential and commercial complexes, building of concrete diaphragm wall has become a common practice and projects are now seeking only the best diaphragm wall company, like HIPL, to be building these D-Walls. But, what exactly is a diaphragm wall, and how does it help building structures? Here’s everything you need to know.

What is a concrete diaphragm wall?

Diaphragm walls or slurry walls are generally reinforced concrete walls, constructed in the ground using an under-slurry technique developed in Europe. This technique involves excavating a narrow trench that is kept full of an engineered fluid of slurry. This way, walls with thickness ranging between 300 mm to 1200 mm can be formed as deep as 45 metres underneath. Inclined rock or soil anchors are used for this purpose. Diaphragm walls are commonly used while constructing structures with deep basements in congested areas, as they can be installed in close proximity to the existing structures.

Previous history of diaphragm wall being used in construction in India

The earliest recorded use of diaphragm wall technology is said to be during the excavations for the construction of Milan Metro in Italy back in the 1950s. In India, this technique can be traced back to the construction of metro rail stations and tunnels, Kolkata Metro being the first ones.

This is a civil engineering technique of construction, pioneered by Heritage Infraspace in deep basement diaphragm walls in India.

Now, in metro construction, D-walls ranging between 800 to 1200 mm are built. But while constructing deep basements for residential and commercial complexes, there are varying sizes used, they are as follows:

• For a single basement construction, we build 300 mm diaphragm walls
• For a double basement construction, we build a minimum 400 mm diaphragm wall
• For a 3-basement construction, we build a minimum 500 mm diaphragm wall
• And for a construction of 4-basement or more, we build diaphragm walls starting at 600 mms.

But here’s a crucial point to remember, all the above depends majorly on the soil strata. For a D-wall to do its job perfectly, the soil must not be loose. D-wall construction makes it cost effective compared to the other older, traditional methods like Piling. The major challenge with Piling, apart from being costly and time consuming, is that it doesn’t maintain the verticality.

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