SH1 rebuild was dangerous work
Near misses with helicopter tail rotors and reckless drivers breaking through cordons were some of the safety risks faced by workers repairing the earthquakedamaged highway north of Kaiko¯ ura.
More than 4000 safety reports were created from when workers started repairing State Highway 1 until the road reopened last December, though most were records of safety meetings.
Almost 800 safety reports were generated in November alone – nearly one for every two employees working on the rebuild.
Documents obtained under the Official Information Act show there were 263 critical risk incidents reported between when the magnitude-7.1 earthquake struck on November 14, 2016, and when the highway reopened on December 15, 2017. The worst month was August, when 57 such incidents were reported.
Critical risk incidents are defined as those that could cause serious harm if they remained uncontrolled. The rebuild work was undertaken by the North Canterbury Transport Infrastructure Alliance (NCTIR), made up of the NZ Transport Agency, Kiwirail and construction companies.
Helicopters caused some of the more noteworthy near misses.
One worker nearly walked into the tail rotor of a helicopter on June 23. He had been working in Clarence for a fortnight and was catching a ride back to Kaiko¯ ura when the pilot asked him to change seats to better balance the chopper. He got away with singed hair from the aircraft’s exhaust.
On June 10, a helicopter carrying a drill rig to a slip face lost its load over the sea due to a failure of the load hook’s mechanical release control.
On May 19, an abseiler fractured and dislocated his ankle when a rock he had earlier tried to move rolled onto him. He was experienced with rope work as an arborist, but did not have experience working to make cliffs safe from loose rock.
In August, after media announced a construction track had been built around the largest slip at O¯ hau Point, a member of the public breached the cordons and drove north through the closed construction zone in their four-wheel-drive. Workers tried to stop them by using a digger to block the road, but the driver got around it and kept going. The incident was reported to police.
An NZTA spokeswoman said the rebuild was made more complex by the terrain, with cliffs on one side of the highway and the ocean on the other.