Dalbeattie Campus

Woolgar Hunter provided Geo-environmental as well as Civil and Structural Engineering services on the new combined school building at Craignair Road, Dalbeattie. The building is home to the town's secondary, primary and nursery school. The new development includes sports facilities including a six-lane running track, a rugby pitch and a 3G pitch for football and hockey.

The involvement of our geo-environmental engineers was integral to the design of this facility, which posed interesting geotechnical engineering challenges, having very weak and compressible soils including buried peat. The site was prone to flooding, with an upfilling exercise being necessary to raise site levels and our geo¬ environmental engineers calculated that this was associated with significant magnitude and duration of self-weight settlement. A package of early stage pre-loading earthworks incorporating vertical band drains to accelerate the settlement was designed and implemented. A piled foundation solution was developed for the buildings in response to the ground conditions External interfaces were a key consideration, to avoid significant differential settlement.

Our geo-environmental engineers worked closely with our civil engineers in the design of the site levels and drainage system as well as the external landscape, which involved extensive landscaping, a biodiversity pond, woodland, a wildflower meadow and an orchard. As well as the geotechnical complexities, our team also undertook a full land contamination risk assessment, to purify the relevant Planning condition and to secure Building Warrant and the SER process.

The new building structure makes use of a hybrid steel and timber frame structure providing a cost and carbon effective solution. Prefabricated insulated timber roof cassettes allowed effective early enclosure of the building and removal of a significant amount of steel framing that would otherwise have been required.