Initiatives | Central Directional Drilling
Getting people connected
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CDD is currently helping connect every home and business in New Plymouth and Wanganui with ultrafast broadband.
What Central Directional Drilling can offer
Central Directional Drilling (CDD) is undertaking the largest job in its history, helping to roll out ultrafast broadband to every home and business in New Plymouth and Wanganui. CDD is a specialist drilling company that has been operating in New Plymouth since 2003. It opened a depot in Wanganui last July for the broadband project and now has a team of 35 working from that branch.
UFB project Director Gary Stonnell says the ultrafast broadband project is the biggest job CDD will probably ever undertake. It is running from North Cape to the Bluff, with CDD involved in the Wanganui and New Plymouth regions for the next five years. “There’s a lot of work out there for a long time to connect every house in the country,” he says. CDD began work on the project in Wanganui last July and just started in New Plymouth in late March. The company has bought two large new drilling rigs for the project, bringing its total number of drills to six, with additional rigs planned. The new drills have 45,000 pounds of thrust and can put in 300-400 metres of pipe on a good day, with a reach of 210 metres. They were custom built in China to CDD’s specifications. The optimum depth for the bore holes is 1m, and they have to stay 1m-1.5m away from trees to avoid damaging roots.
• Central Directional Drilling is owned by Gary and Erin Stonnell. Gary has drilled in oil fields throughout the world for 14 years, working in Russia for two years before returning home to start CDD in 2003. • The company has grown steadily from a two-man operation to a major player in the drilling industry, employing more than 60 staff.
“Most cities have a history of 100 years and as they grow, so does the infrastructure. To put this system in place and get it across those services and into every house, there’s a fairly high risk of wiping out those other services. There’s a lot of time and care taken to ensure that doesn’t happen,” he says.
• In its nine years of operation, CDD has worked all over New Zealand, drilling and laying cables, drains, pipes and gas mains for councils and large infrastructure companies. • CDD has worked extensively with the New Plymouth City Council on such projects as laying sewer pipes up to 7 metres deep in the township of Oakura. • It has also laid new gas mains, power lines in city centres and upgrades for major power companies.
The orange pipe fed out into bore holes is 180mm round and contains many more smaller colour-coded pipes, one for each property.
Each drill is fitted with a transmitter that signals its location to a worker above ground holding a computer. The signals are accurate to the millimetre.
Once the pipes have been laid, those smaller internal glass or plastic pipes have to be tested to make sure every one of them works before the holes in pavement can be sealed. Each cabinet is connected to 80-110 properties, and the testing process can take weeks.
Staff use a digital mapping system to locate the underground services they need to avoid, and dig test holes to make sure of their depth.
Central Directional Drilling is currently ahead of its target, with the project progressing extremely well.
Complicated drilling process Stonnell says the biggest challenge of the job is avoiding other underground pipes and infrastructure.
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