Victoria Sugar Mill Stack Scaffolding

The Victoria Sugar Mill Estate in Queensland is the largest sugar mill in Australia and one of the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. A 66m tall stack on the site required maintenance works, which included structural repairs, blasting and painting. A working platform was needed to carry this out, which required a scaffolding system that was quick to assemble, reliable and light weight.

Our team was asked to design and certify the scaffold system that would encase the stack and remain in place throughout the duration of the works.

One of the major challenges was that the location of the project fell in a cyclonic region and there was the potential that a cyclone would hit while the scaffold was up. We modelled the full scaffold in three distinct sections and specifically designed it to withstand cyclonic wind speeds up to 230km/h. This would allow for the majority of the scaffold to remain in place during such an event and ensure minimal disassembly and associated down time.

The project won the Townsville Chamber of Commerce Award for Innovation and our close working relationship with Benchmark Scaffolding & Edge Protection and Layher Australia allowed us to apply the Layher system to this project efficiently.