Liverpool Churchill Way Flyovers Project
Iconic architecture is what makes our cities unique. Visitors often marvel at the feats of modern engineering that dominate city skylines, but how often do they consider what happens to these magnificent structures when they are no longer fit for purpose.
Residents of Liverpool will be familiar with the imposing Churchill Way flyovers, where work recently began to safely remove the failing structures.
Dismantling a recognisable part of the city’s landscape, such as the Churchill Way flyovers that have stood for fifty years, is a major undertaking that requires unique expertise. Our specialist industry experience in core cutting, built up over 40 years in the field, ensures we have an important role to play in this project.
The concrete, two-lane Churchill Way flyovers have been a major feature of the city centre for five decades but were closed to the public in September 2018 after construction flaws were discovered. Strengthening the flyovers was explored but deemed impractical due to the way they were originally built, so the decision was made to dismantle and remove.
As we work as part of a skilled team to dismantle 240 metres of flyover a great deal of care and attention is taken – not to mention strict adherence to health and safety regulation. While it may look straight-forward for a tower block to be flattened on the evening news, dismantling any imposing structure is just as intricate as the construction, if not more.
Each span of the Churchill Way flyover weighs between 300 and 600 tonnes and we are working with colleagues from a wide range of industries to remove a total of 20 spans and supporting piers. Imagine relocating two blue whales, twenty times over, and you get some idea of the scale of this project.
Employing our technical expertise, each span will be temporarily supported before being cut free and transported to a nearby compound, where each will be lowered to ground level, cut into smaller sections and removed to be crushed.
This unique and challenging task will be carried out over a 16-week period with limited disruption to local residents, including minimising the dust, noise, vibrations and environmental impact to the surrounding area. Every aspect is carefully considered so there are limited road closures and we will work on a 24-hour cycle throughout the project so that noisy demolition tasks take place during the day, with the lifting and moving during the evening or night time.
Corecut has undertaken many challenging projects across the UK, throughout our 40 years in business, for example recently in the Queen Street Tunnel. We take great pride in taking a complex and logistically challenging project and breaking it down – often literally – into manageable parts.