The Marohapa social housing in Moerewa, near Paihia, is a 35-unit social housing development. It was built by our client Canam Construction, for the Ngāti Hine Health Trust. Canam is a privately-owned New Zealand business that specialises in the construction, refurbishment and fit-out of commercial and residential buildings. It has offices in Auckland, the Bay of Plenty and Northland.

After decades of under-investment in the area of social housing, new building projects are mushrooming all over the country. Northland is no exception.

Canam was looking for a local, Far North engineering firm to help deliver this project and we were delighted to be able to help. We try to put community at the heart of everything we do at Haigh Workman, so helping to grow Northland’s stock of desperately-needed social housing fits beautifully with our values and our purpose. 

We had two roles in this project. Firstly, we undertook the structural design for the 35 units and an associated wellness centre. The plans called for eight different designs across all the units, some of which are double-storey. They vary from two to four bedrooms.

Our biggest challenge was time. The deadline we were asked to work to was very tight indeed so the team pulled out all the stops and delivered as requested, demonstrating the flexibility and commitment we like to think are the hallmarks of any Haigh Workman project.

The second part of our involvement was built around project management. In the early stages we worked closely with the project architect to ensure, between us, that Canam was receiving the very best possible value for money. With projects like this, value engineering is incredibly important. Design, engineering and construction choices – for instance, are we able to use glulam timber instead of steel – can make the difference between whether a project is financially viable or not. This focus in value engineering undoubtedly helped ensure that the project came in not only on time, but also on budget. 

Once building started we were responsible for construction management.

Our team found working on this project hugely rewarding. It’s exactly the sort of end product that floats our boat and the various challenges around time-scales and project delivery really kept us on our toes. We look forward to working on other social housing projects as government investment continues and Northland providers start chipping away at the backlog.

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We always get a massive buzz from doing work that we know improves the lives of the communities in which we ourselves live, work and play. One such project has to be that commissioned by Northland Regional Council to reduce the risk of Otiria and Moerewa flooding.

The Otiria and Waiharakeke streams are part of the Kawakawa River system. The streams have always spilled after heavy rains over wide floodplains between Otiria and Kawakawa. But for decades roads, bridges and an embankment built for a now-defunct railway line have combined to create havoc with this natural cycle – channelling floodwaters into residential properties, marae and a community rugby club in Otiria and Moerewa. 

During big floods about 80 percent of the water from the Otiria Stream spilled over nearby land, as did 70 percent from the Waiharakeke Stream. The increasing frequency and severity of these events had become intolerable for these communities, so extensive stormwater management and flood mitigation work was commissioned by Northland Regional Council. Haigh Workman was engaged by the Council to conduct a feasibility study into whether it was possible to protect these communities from floods by restoring the streams’ natural flows and, if so, how this might be achieved. 

Having delivered the good news that, yes, protection was technically possible, we were then tasked with developing the preliminary design, the geotechnical study and reporting, and the detailed infrastructure engineering design resulting from these findings. 

We developed a three-stage plan that diverts floodwater from the Otiria stream via a spillway beneath two of the ‘problem’ roads and into the neighbouring Waiharakeke stream – away from some of the most flood-prone housing in Otiria and Moerewa. The Waiharakeke stream is then contained in its channel by a series of overflow channels and stop-banks.

Once the feasibility, planning and design stages were completed we were briefed by our client, the Council, to provide the engineering support for the consenting process. We also provided contaminated soils investigation and remediation, project pricing for funding and contract documentation. 

Then, with the project consented and given the go-ahead by our client, we undertook all elements of construction management, including roading and traffic management.

This was an extremely rewarding project that has made a huge difference to the quality of life of some of the most flood-prone communities in our district. We were very grateful to have been asked to help and delighted to have been able to do so.

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Haigh Workman has the privilege of being the lead consultant in the development of Arvida’s Te Puna Waiora Retirement Village in Kerikeri. This Auckland-based, publicly-listed retirement living provider wanted to work with a local engineering firm to help realise its ambitions for a high-quality retirement village in the Mid North.  

Our involvement in this decade-long project started in 2017 at the pre-purchase stage, with a site ‘walk-over’ with our client to assess the general suitability of the site. Any developer can obtain significant value by bringing an engineering company in at the very earliest stages of the project to assess aspects such as the availability of suitable infrastructure and the phasing of any geotechnical engineering work that might be necessary.

As with any land development, the timing of this project was key. Kerikeri’s expanded wastewater treatment plant was under construction and, for the first time, a significant tranche of land that could be serviced by this enlarged facility was becoming available. We were able to use this local knowledge to help Arvida assess its options.

It’s always a pleasure to work with a client who is willing to be guided on aspects of its development and Arvida is one such. We were involved in the project master-planning and were able to coordinate early in the process with other experts who were key to the project’s success; architects, landscape architects, noise and acoustics experts, planners and community engagement facilitators, to name just a few.

We’ve had the pleasure of being involved with this project from design to the completion of various stages of construction, and then handover. It’s been a challenging yet incredibly satisfying piece of work. At Te Puna Waiora we’ve done everything that could possibly fit under the engineering banner: roading and traffic, civil works and infrastructure engineering, geotech, site design, structural design, environmental engineering relating to stormwater management and wastewater design, remediation of contaminated land (it was a HAIL site), and construction monitoring.

Social procurement has been an important feature of our project management. As lead consultant we’ve been responsible for delivering to Arvida a turn-key solution and this has involved local procurement; engaging, managing and – where necessary – upskilling a team of contractors based entirely in Northland. On any day there are as many as 100 contractors on site.

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