CopperString 2032 - Traffic Studies

Project Background

The CopperString 2032 project, led by Powerlink Queensland, is an approximately 840 km new high-voltage electricity transmission line from just south of Townsville in the Burdekin region to Mount Isa. It will connect the North West Minerals Province of Queensland to the National Electricity Market to reduce the cost of power supply and facilitate support the large-scale development of the Hughenden wind resource and solar resources within the North Queensland Clean Energy Hub.

What we did

pitt&sherry was engaged to undertake Traffic Impact Assessments for the CopperString 2032 project. The purpose of the Traffic Impact Assessments was to assess the risk and impact of the project-related construction vehicles to the operation, condition and safety of impacted Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads and Council Road networks, between Townsville and Mount Isa.

An extensive assessment was completed. A framework was developed to assess the risk of adding project related traffic to the road network based on several factors including, sight distance, road width, road condition, speed limit and other hazards and items of interest.

Outcomes

Initially the risks from project-generated traffic to the road network were assessed and quantified based on site visits, available information from the UGL CPB Contractors Joint Venture and publicly available data.

A list of mitigation measures was then developed to address each of the identified risks. As many of the risks identified were observed in several locations, these mitigation measures were streamlined so that similar approaches could be applied across the project. Following this, any item that initially had a risk level identified as higher than "low" had a minimum of one mitigation measure applied to reduce the level of risk.

Traffic Impact Assessment reports were prepared that detailed the process and provided a list of mitigation measures for the UGL CPB Contractors Joint Venture to apply to facilitate the construction of the CopperString 2032 project so that the impact to the safety and operation of roads is minimised.