A comprehensive project
The plant covers an area of 25 hectares, and includes five treatment buildings. After pre-treatment, the water is separated from the sludge. It then passes through a biofiltration building, before being released into the River Seine or recycled for use in the operation of the plant. The sludge is centrifuged and dewatered, and then dried. At the same location, the air from all of the buildings is deodorised using a powerful ventilation system, and then treated before being released to the exterior. Alongside the treatment units stand an operation building, housing the control room – the “brain” of the plant – and an

administration building, housing offices for support functions.


An in-house project
“Installing all of the electrical equipment for a wastewater treatment plant is a first for ETDE”, explains Olivier Babo. “The contract is worth 9.8 million euros, excluding the supplementary work currently in the process of being finalised. And the whole thing is being supplied from in-house, including the design work. ”
The execution design office at Challenger was assigned the electrical work, while the I&C and supervision work was assigned to the Les Mureaux site and ETDE South-East respectively. The Major Projects unit at Electrical, Mechanical & HVAC Engineering Paris Region is responsible for coordinating this example of genuine teamwork.
The contract is the third that ETDE has signed with SIAAP, following the contracts for the wastewater treatment plants at Colombes (worth €1.4 million) in 2002-2003 and Les Cormailles (€4.8 million) in 2004-2005.
The first tranche of the Les Grésillons plant is being supplied on a design-and-build basis by a consortium headed by Stereau (a former Bouygues subsidiary) and also including Bouygues TP on the civil engineering side. ETDE is acting as a sub-contractor for the process consortium, headed by Stereau.

Controlled from a laptop computer
“From the design phase onward, we have been fully involved in the process”, explains Olivier Babo. “With this project, it wasn’t just about meeting a specification.”
“We had to carry out a whole series of preliminary studies before the execution studies”, adds Bastien Bertel. “We had to determine a set of requirements and describe precisely what we were going to do.”
“It’s a highly technical, typically ‘industrial’ project”, confirms Olivier Babo. “The quality of the work is clear to see, the cable supports are impeccable, all the cables are painted and marked…”.
ETDE is also supplying all of the ELV systems for the project, including fire detection, video-surveillance, telephony and DECT, anti-intrusion, access control, and truck weighbridge systems. The group is also installing a WiFi network to allow the customer to  control  the  plant  using  a

laptop computer – a first for France! Operators can use a secure laptop to access supervision functions and initiate a range of operations from anywhere in the plant. In addition, no local controls are installed in the plant.
ETDE is responsible for the supply, installation and commissioning of I&C and supervision systems, with application servers, operation servers and monitoring screens. “The programme developed at ETDE provides an overall view of the plant”, says works engineer Jean-Henri Choyer enthusiastically. “By clicking on a building, we can see what it contains. We can also zoom in and view the status of motors. What is most impressive is that we can see all of the physical points that we wired on the site. There are more than 500 in building A alone!”
Another feature of this project is the entirely redundant I&C architecture: in the event of failure of a central processing unit, or any other communications device installed in the process, automatic switchover enables continuity of operation to be assured. In another of the plant’s state-of-the-art reliability-enhancement features, electrical power supplies are also redundant; what is more, inverters provide backup in the event of loss of off-site power.

ETDE is also installing a computer-aided maintenance management (CAMM) system. SIAAP’s desire for an increased focus on preventive maintenance means that it has paid particularly close attention to this system.


8,000 hours of design work
60,000 hours of installation
6,000 hours of testing
For this project, scheduled for delivery in March 2007, the preliminary studies began in March 2003, and the detailed design work one year later. The works for the plant kicked off on August 16, 2005, and were scheduled for completion by the end of July 2006 (including electromechanical tests).
This fairly tight schedule was further pressurised by the fact that testing with clean water was scheduled between August and October 2006, with untreated water tests booked for October 2006 to January 2007. This will leave two months for commissioning and runup to capacity under real conditions.
“Our customer knows what they’re talking about in technical terms, and knows what they want”, says Michel Hamidi, senior site worker and production supervisor. “The quality of our work has to be irreproachable…we had to locate and wire 4500 physical points, and find the most reliable routings possible. We also had to manage a tight schedule while carrying out daily checks in that jungle of cables. On the “production” side, we had as many as 80 people on-site in peak periods. And we also had to pay particular attention to safety.”
“We put extensive monitoring procedures in place”, stresses Bastien Bertel, “with factory testing of equipment before arrival on-site – 40 days of platform tests for electrical panels, and 30 days of testing for I&C and supervision systems. For the plant itself, this represents around 6,000 hours of tests, equivalent to approximately 10% of the total installation time. We also defined prototypes for all of our work, both design and installation. At each stage, we propose a solution to the customer, so that they can validate it”.
This level of service requires real investment, and impeccable organisation.

Three exceptional projects
The site extends over 90,000 m², equivalent to three football pitches stacked five levels high. Into this space have to be threaded 800 km of electrical cable, 26 km of steel pipework for the air conditioning, 1,500 m² of fire-proof ducting, and 70 km of water pipes. “Each of the work packages is a major project in itself”, reports Alain Guivarch, production manager for the electrical         installation          work

package. He is responsible for both light current and heavy current installations including the main electricity sub-station and three transformer sub-stations with a total power capacity of 11.2 MVA. The hospital will also have 4.8 MVA of independent generating capacity. “In addition to the traditional range of hospital equipment, such as patient call buttons, video surveillance, access control, intercoms, fire detection and, of course, an emergency back-up power system, this hospital will also be fitted with a high-performance voice-date-image network combining telephone, television, cameras, and IP data”, continues Alain Guivarch. The electrical power consumed by the hospital will be around 5 MVA, equivalent to more than 5% of the total average power consumption in Tahiti. “We have installed an electrical power management system to help the hospital managers keep their electricity consumption under control. This is especially important here as all electrical energy has to be imported and is consequently very expensive”, he adds. The figures for the air conditioning are also impressive. The hospital has 7,500 kilowatts of installed cooling power, enough air conditioning for around 750 homes. “There are five enormous water cooling plants on the roof terrace with a total weight of over 50 tonnes including acoustic screening. Getting them into position was a problem as we were not able to use the site cranes”, explains Pierre Thivat, production manager for the air conditioning work package.
The cooled water feeds 70 air conditioners, 1500 convector panels and a special laminar flow system for the nine operating theatres. “The most difficult problem was to ensure that all our plumbing and air conditioning installations met the latest anti-legionella regulations”, comments Martial Quillet, production manager for the plumbing work package and responsible for the installation of an ultra filtration plant and a system
for distributing legionella-free hot and cold water to the 2,300 sanitary fittings. The entire building will be controlled by a central multi-point technical management system (more than 5,000 points).

Centralised management
Although contractually under the overall control of the project management company, ETDE coordinates the progress of the three work packages very carefully by means of a central management organisation. Assisting Jérôme Aruanno, production director Damien Richard ensures that all three tasks are coordinated together. The manager of each work package describes their problems and progress to the others at regular site meetings. Conflicts are resolved and the provision of contradictory information to the customer is avoided. “This enables us to become a real multi-disciplinary business, stresses Damien Richard, as it is true that we were not equally familiar with all three work packages!”. The central management organisation also makes it easier to plan the project as a whole. It has to be admitted  that  the

number of problems capable of affecting the schedule has grown. In the first place, the shell of the building was erected in 2004 before the technical services contracts were awarded to ETDE. The openings needed to pass the ducting, cables and pipework through the internal walls had not been taken into account. “We counted around 10,000 openings that had not been made. We had to re-route services or make new openings in the walls” explains Claude Hamon, manager responsible for routing, tests and inspections. This led to a profusion of change notes, many resulting from the delay in involving the future users – the doctors – in the project. “We had to change the design completely in some areas”, recalls Claude Delcros, electrical installation design manager. It was then necessary to work department by department rather than floor by floor so that the owner EGT could get on with fitting out completed areas. “Everything had to be done piecemeal”, recalls Martial Quillet. “And with 2,500 separate rooms, the entire building was like a giant sponge”, adds Claude Hamon. Hence the careful attention paid to preparation, methods and scheduling.


Planning ahead
These difficulties are compounded by the scale of the site. “It takes a good ten minutes to walk from one end of the site to the other, so there’s no way you’re going to forget to bring all your tools with you”, exclaims Jean Ibadioune, foreman. A vast building site with no spare space. “There is no room to store anything on site”, explains Guillaume Hébert, project supplies manager. “We have had to set up two storage sites, one a few metres away in Pirae, the other at Mahina which is 15 km away. Neither site is very big and we effectively operate on a ‘just-in-time’ basis.” Organising supplies is therefore crucially important. “More so than in any other project”, confirms Guillaume Gaucherot, logistics and scheduling manager, “as even the smallest order can take several months to be delivered to the site. You must remember that we are 20,000 km away from France. Planning ahead is essential.” Planning, management and coordination are the project keywords. Software tools are being used for the first time in an international project, including Edoc for documentation management, Siri for expenditure commitment, Regate for monitoring budgets, and Primavera for scheduling (first used by ETDE in this project). All the tools needed for the effective management of a major project.


100% tahitian
“Our greatest success in this project has been to transform a constraint into a major advantage” recalls Guillaume Hébert. The contract requires that all the labour on site, reaching a peak of 250 workers, must be Polynesian. “It’s not easy to find enough skilled workers in Tahiti and the surrounding islands. There was only one solution - training!”, explains Nathalie Bannwarth, human resources manager.
A four-way training agreement was set up between the Polynesian government, the local job centres (SEFI), the training organisation GREPFOC, and the client EGT. Sixty trainees followed a part-time course arranged by the Tahitian training and employment organisations, 44 of whom succeeded in gaining a Level 5 Professional Training Certificate. More than thirty of these trainees have since joined the air conditioning and electrical installation teams. “I learned how to read a drawing and route cables, relates Marati Tematahotoa, 23. Now, I can explain the basics of the work to new employees. ETDE have asked me to stay on and work on another project, the new Sofitel hotel in Bora Bora. That proves that I have what it takes to succeed in this trade!” Similar training in plumbing has also been provided, and training for adult job-seekers is also planned. “The training was planned not only to provide us with a pool of workers, but also to make sure that our employees had the recognized qualifications needed to continue their chosen careers in the future, stresses Nathalie Bannwarth. Our current challenges are productivity and safety”, adds Guillaume Hébert. Daily checks have been introduced, along with safety competitions between the teams. “We continually have to remind them that we want them to return home in the evening in good health”, continues Nathalie, “I explain safe methods of working, we require helmets and other protective clothing to be worn on site, including the gao, a form of navy blue shift. When it’s 35°C on site, they all want to work bare-chested and that can be dangerous.”

Health and safety, employment law, regulations for public contracts – the regulatory framework applicable to the project is similar to that in France. “In the end, it’s a French project, but also an international one, jokes Jérôme Aruanno. But it’s very important to be involved in a major project like this one that fits so well into the strategic framework set out by Gérard Perceau for the international division. We started the ball rolling. Others are following, and more will follow in the future”. And what of the future for ETDE Tahiti when the project is handed over in mid 2007? “Watch this space!”, replies Hervé Lançon, operations director for the region.