Critical delay at construction of major power station

Stock photo

South Africa

The construction of one of the world’s largest coal‑fired power stations faced delay and disruption amid failures of high‑strength steel bolts installed across a gigantic air‑cooled condenser structure, roughly 11No football fields in plan and about 70m tall. Hundreds of thousands of bolts were identified as potentially defective, prompting extensive replacement campaigns and a high-value dispute between the principal contractor and the steelwork subcontractor, ultimately referred to an International Arbitration.

For the purposes of this complex matter, I was asked to investigate the structural risk arising from the bolt failures and whether the bolt-replacement campaigns could have been devised in a manner that prevented critical delay.