Serah Philip

As a graduate civil engineer, you have a good balance between working in the office as well as working on site. I recently went to the great wild west to inspect the Murchison Dam and also used it as an opportunity to see some of our other beautiful assets up there.

4.30 AM

My alarm went off (yes, I’m one of those early birds) and it was quite dark outside. I had a cup of coffee and go for a quick run to catch the sunrise before heading to the west coast.

6.30 AM

I had my second cup of coffee and head out to pick up my colleagues and start our road trip! The weather is cold and gloomy (as expected) but thankfully I had good company.

10.00 AM

We get a call from our field staff up at west coast. They needed a few civil engineers to come up on site for technical advice regarding the trash racks at Mackintosh. A trash rack is a wooden or metal intake structure that prevent debris from entering the intake of the dam. As we were already enroute, we decided to pop into their office and inspect the situation. Oh, and did I mention how gorgeous the weather turned out to be at the wild west?

12.00 PM

A couple of phone calls, a collaboration between a few teams and a few brainstorming sessions later, we have come to a solution for the technical issue. We drive to the nearest boat ramp and have lunch by the water after.

1.00 PM

We finished our lunch, send a few important emails and head off to our next site…….Tribute Power Station.

1.30 PM

We reached Tribute and one of our wonderful Maintenance Area Operator gave us a quick tour of our underground tribute power station. 

He told us that the air vents at the station gets clogged up and needed replacement. So we do a quick inspection of the vents used and added this in our long list of items to work on when we head back into the office.

3.30 PM

We finally head to Murchison and walk alongside the great wall of Murchison.

We have had several design reviews in the past few weeks with external consultants regarding the upgrade of this dam and hence this visit was more or less to inspect the current condition of the asset as well as to have a visual understanding of how the proposed solutions may look like.

5.30 PM

We had back into Queenstown and check into Silver Hills Motel.

6.30 PM

We have dinner at the motel with a beautiful backdrop to look at.

8.00 PM

Send a couple more urgent emails, caught up with the fam, Netflix & chill…..

9.30 PM

Realised I may have chilled too much and had been dozing in front of Netflix for half an hour, so switched it off and went to bed for proper sleep this time!

7.00 AM

Stopped by the nearest coffee shop for a cuppa (where we also found ourselves being judged by a random duck) and started our drive back to Hobart!!