A Blast from the Past (a market leader for over 40 years)

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 The repair of the concrete jetty on the River Severn, where the tides are phenomenally high, presents a special type of challenge. Jack Barfoot talks with contractors, Colebrand Contracting Limited.

Built in the sixties, the trestle type reinforce pre-cast concrete jetty supports and gives service access to a pylon standing away from the shore immediately downstream of the Severn bridge at Aust in the County of Avon. Work comprised patch repairs to the trestles, together with repair to, and extending the cover of, the insitu concrete plinths at the base of the trestles.

Phil Stainton, who was in charge of the contract, and Chris Walton, Manager of South Wales office and Contracts manager on a major maintenance contract on the neighboring Severn Bridge, described the contract and its relevant aspects to me. "The repairs themselves were fairly orthodox although the length of defective concrete repaired at any time on a trestle leg was confined to two metres, and on no more than two of the four arises, in order to minimise the reduction of the structural integrity of the trestle during the repair procedure. We used Nufins Nupatch proprietary fast setting mortar and concrete repair system, and the general procedure was that of traditionally cutting back any damage as far as the reinforcement, which was then grit blasted to bright metal and primed with a Colebrand material, CXL 111. Then using a timber shutter, the repair material was poured in from the top, vibrated and left to set, which took about an our to achieve”.

This simple-enough-sounding operation, however, was fraught with a number of difficulties, I learned.

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