About half-way down the South Island’s West Coast lies Hokitika, a town whose beauty comes with significant seismic activity. For this reason, weight loading has been a critical factor in the fitting of a platform solution for Westland Milk’s dairy factory.

While all structures in New Zealand in the last century have been designed with earthquake safety in mind, adding additional weight at height to an existing structure runs the risk of putting increased stress on a building’s performance during a seismic event. For this reason, Westland Milk needed a solution that delivered excellent performance without compromising on weight.

To complicate this situation further, it wasn’t possible to open up the roofing structure in advance of fit-out to identify the exact loading and mounting points, so we knew an adaptable solution would make all the difference.
At the last minute, this platform had to be reconfigured and installed on an adjacent building, due to hidden weaknesses at the original platform location. Re-configuring a heavy welded or bolted structural platform would have been the stuff of nightmares. With Xbeam it was minimal. The Xbeam provided an adaptable solution that could be customized late into the project and fitted with minimal disruption, all the while saving on weight demands. Another success for Xbeam.