Working on North Stradbroke Island is hardly a chore and working on Seqwater’s water treatment plants provided the perfect balance of challenge and reward for Practical Engineering’s Project Department Manager, <a href=”https://www.practicalengineering.com.au/news/meet-our-people—vimal-soni”>Vimal Soni</a>.

Recently Seqwater commissioned Practical Engineering to manage upgrades to the three core water treatment plants (WTP) on North Stradbroke Island, at the townships of Dunwich, Point Lookout, and Amity Point.

Seqwater continually assesses their infrastructure to identify opportunities for improvement. The installation of power generators at the North Stradbroke Island water treatment plants was proposed as a cost-effective measure to reduce the risk of power outages impacting plant operations. While long outages are rare, they can have a significant impact on the efficiency of Seqwater’s water treatment and supply on North Stradbroke Island.

The project called for dedicated generators to be installed at each WTP that would commence operation immediately following a power outage. The generators would ensure consistency of water supply for residents and tourists across the island.

“The biggest challenge with this job was logistics – managing the wide variety of contractors and personnel from design through to construction phase at the remote site,” says Vimal Soni, Project Manager on this job. “Secondarily, managing shut downs to ensure we avoided any school holidays, public holidays or other peak tourist dates,” he adds. To successfully complete all aspects of this work, Practical partnered with Christopher Contracting for the civil engineering and earth works and with J&amp;P Richardson Industries for all electrical engineering and construction elements.

The most enjoyable aspect of this job for Vimal? “Location,” says Vimal quickly, “you can’t go past the location” he says, after making the island his ‘home’ for a decent portion of a six week period.

The other thing that Vimal enjoyed was managing the variety of subcontractors and project managing all civil and electrical works. “Although managing all of these elements for a remote site was one of the biggest challenges, overcoming those difficulties, learning and overseeing the entire scope of works and every engineering discipline was also very rewarding,” says Vimal. “Continuing to grow my own understanding of electrical engineering and skills in electrical fault finding and resolution was also very satisfying,” he finishes.

Practical Engineering is a mechanical engineering consultancy, however is capable and experienced at managing a range of multidisciplinary engineering works such as this. We pride ourselves on providing creativity with engineering excellence to provide practical solutions to our clients’ most complex issues.