Retaining walls alongside the river to prevent future erosion of the waterway.
T
he Hartbeesspruit Waterway runs through
the Hillcrest Campus of the University of
Pretoria, which is home to the LC de Villiers
Sports Grounds and the High Performance
Centre (HPC), a major elite sports facility in
South Africa.
Established in 2002, the HPC has become
the preferred location for the pre-departure
camps of South African national sporting
teams, in addition to being selected by several
international federations as their preferred
specialisation centre.
“Therefore, it is imperative that the
waterways in the vicinity of the training facilities
are managed such that flood events do not
damage them or affect their use,” comments
Shaun Chamberlain, function manager: dams &
hydro at SMEC South Africa.
The design work involved hydraulic
modelling of the waterway, while the actual
restoration work included construction of a new
13m-wide spillway at the original farm dam as
the dam’s previous spillway had been outflanked,
and re-shaping of the dam basin to encourage a
diverse ecology.
While restoration of the farm dam was the
focus of the project, other existing erosion
issues had been caused by the fast-flowing
river and needed attention. These included two
scour holes, each about 1.5m deep, which were
repaired and filled with rip-rap to prevent further
erosion and to slow the flow downstream.
SMEC South Africa also designed and
implemented repairs to the Loffelstein retaining
walls alongside the river to prevent future
erosion of the waterway, and a debris grate at
26
Water Sewage & Effluent May/June 2017