This commission by CCMS, was for the design and supervision of a new secondary school on a steeply sloping, green field site at Chanterhill, Enniskillen.
In addition to the structural engineering design of the new school buildings, our brief included the design of all new playing fields and of the site foul/ storm drainage system, main access road and car parking.
The new playing fields consisted of a full sized gaelic football sand mattress grass pitch, a hard porous soccer pitch and four porous bitmac tennis courts.
Given the steeply sloping topography of the site, considerable design effort went into investigating the most efficient way of creating the level platforms necessary to construct the pitches on. A series of options of varying pitch/ court layouts and finished surface levels were considered.
The outcome of the option study resulted in a split level arrangement with the hard porous and grass pitch on one level and the tennis courts at a lower level. This layout resulted in a balance between the cut and fill earthwork quantities on the site, thus saving the importation of any fill materials to construct the pitch platform.
It was necessary to form retaining structures along the boundaries of filled areas of the pitches and these consisted of a number of different types of reinforced earth embankments.