Race against time to make Kmart building safe

With only 5 days to go until the planned opening of the Queenstown Central shopping complex, construction workers were still battling against the clock today to fix the beleaguered Kmart building.

It's understood that QLDC building inspectors are due on site on Monday to decide if hurried and extensive repairs to the Kmart building are enough to make the building safe for the public to start using on October 18th.

A whistle blower contractor sent the council photos in August of extensive damage to the Kmart building as a result of a worker cutting through much of the vital steel connections between the foundations and the walls. Dominion Constructors, the company managing the construction project, has been unable to explain how such extensive errors were not picked up by their site managers.

Today teams were still in the process of building secondary wall structures to support the existing walls that became detached from the foundations when most of the connecting steel was cut. In spite of assurances from Dominion that the repairs were "not complex" documents accessed by Crux tell a different story.

Detail of how the new secondary wall structures need to be attached to the old, detached Kmart walls. That work still had some way to go today.

 

Even late Saturday afternoon the remedial work still looked as if it had a long way to go.

The north end of the Kmart building on Saturday afternoon showing remedial work on the ground level concrete walls.

Other parts of the $100 million Queenstown Central complex also looked far from finished today

Queenstown Central on Saturday afternoon. Finished in 5 days?

Sources close to the project have told Crux that many of the workers on site are not experienced enough to tackle the massive project. Other sources have spoken of payment delays to contractors and serious project management issues.

Main Image: Construction teams at work today on the east wall of the Kmart building.

Read: Our detailed investigation of the Kmart construction problems.