Page 56 - Australian Defence Magazine September 2019

INFRASTRUCTURE
PLANNING
“Historically, E&IG has had around 60 per cent local industry content in its capital works projects but it is now achieving around 80 per cent of the value of the work done.”
relocate people to somewhere else and that involves investment. The money you make by selling the property often doesn’t even cover your relocation costs but, where we do save is in the future, because we don’t have to maintain and redevelop that property.”
Site remediation
The remediation of former (and sometimes current) Defence sites is an important body of work for E&IG and none more so than the ongoing Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl sub- stances (PFAS) clean up at locations where firefighting foam was used.
Defence has run investigations at 27 dif- ferent sites around the country in recent times, over half of which have been com- pleted. Once an investigation is completed E&IG puts an ongoing management plan for the site in place.
“Where we have found contamination, off the base in particular, the ongoing man- agement plan considers the future sampling regime and what we are doing about the
Over the years RAAF Base Amberley has undergone numerous upgrades to the base and
its facilities. Various areas within the base are still under construction and will continue regular upgrades supplying suitable facilities to ensure maximum capability into the future.
provision of clean water where necessary. There are only four sites where we actu- ally have to do that, things like connecting people to town water, installing rainwater tanks or whatever the appropriate solution is, and then how we’ll seek to remediate it,” Grzeskowiak explained.
“We’ve started remediation at five places and mostly it involves cleaning water, but in some places, we’ve started excavating soil, particularly from areas where there were point sources of contamination such as the old firefighting training areas. We’ve been both storing and isolating soil, be- cause taking PFAS out of soil is still a dif- ficult process.”
Grzeskowiak says a prototype soil treat- ment plant developed by Ventia is being commissioned at RAAF Base Edinburgh and if it proves as successful as hoped, it may lead to use at other locations around the country, but he says E&IG is working with over 90 companies who have ideas on PFAS remediation.
The funding for the remediation comes
from within the existing E&IG budget and over $110 million has been spent to date.
“We’ve treated over two billion litres of water to remove PFAS below limits of detection and that work will continue,” Grzeskowiak said. “We’re focussing our ef- forts on those areas where there are higher concentrations and those areas where it’s running through waterways. Scientists and engineers are coming up with different op- tions for how we might clean up legacy con- tamination, but I expect we’ll be doing this work for a long time yet.”
Base Services Contracts
The Base Services Contracts with indus- try are approaching the half-way mark of their full 10-year terms, they are six-year contracts with two two-year extensions to take them out to 10 years. The current in- cumbent contractors have had their con- tracts extended to the eight-year mark and Grzeskowiak says thinking about how they may look in the future has already begun.
“We’ll do that thinking internally for a
little while but, at some point we’ll be go- ing out to industry, to our existing contrac- tors and others, to see if there are new ideas about how we can do this more effectively than we are now,” he explained to ADM.
“There are some aspects of the original contracts that are working really well and there are some that we think could be bet- ter, for a whole range of reasons. The suite of contracts we have now is quite different to the previous suite. We’re looking to draw on the expertise of our base services contrac- tors to help us to manage the base.
“It’s working well in many areas, but it’s now a question of what the next step might be and how we get the benefit of a partnership, rather than a pure commercial relationship.”
GEMS
The Garrison Estate Management System (GEMS), which is used in the planning and delivery of estate maintenance has now been running for more than a year and is now starting to prove its value.
“We’ve been in a bit of a data black hole after we turned off the previous system. We’re now starting to get an accumulation of data into GEMS which will enable us to build confidence in our data set and use it to make better informed decisions around how we maintain our assets,” Grzeskowiak said.
“The last piece of GEMS is the geospatial capability, which will roll out in November this year. That should give us the ability to really leverage the data that’s in GEMS.”
56 | September 2019 | www.australiandefence.com.au
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