Objective: To provide geotechnical sampling of Lyttelton port and the reclaimed land following the Canterbury earthquakes.

McMillan Drilling Group was initially engaged to carry out investigation work on ground conditions following the Christchurch earthquakes. This work was done over various areas of the port and led to us being engaged to perform a more localised investigation on the Lyttelton Port Company reclamation project. More than 2.4 million tonnes of earthquake demolition material has gone into the reclamation area and has been used to grow the port by 5.5 hectares to enable it to meet forecasted demand. Our role was to provide geotechnical sampling of the reclaimed land to allow engineers to establish the stability of the land. This testing was done both on-shore and off-shore. We have also been engaged in a large-scale dredging operation for the Lyttelton Port Company, dredging 18 million cubic metres of material out of the main shipping lane. Designed to enable the port to accept larger ships, the project required a large amount of sampling and investigation work by our team. Again, the work was all off-shore, drilling from a barge in the inner harbour right out to the heads.