Day 20: Bright Start Beach Resort Site Visit

On two successive days, we all went on a site visit to Bright Start Beach Resort located on Jumeirah Beach Road, right next to Dubai Ladies Club. It extends to an area of 60,000 m² comprising of a hotel building and an underground car park. The hotel is 5 star rating; it consists of 237 rooms along with other common areas such as restaurants, bars, lounges, pool restaurants, tennis courts and all different types of entertainment. This project is expected to finish at the end of March 2014. On our first day, Mr. Jihad Choueiri (project manager) along with Mr. Subrahmanyam (project director) gave us a brief description on the project as a whole and on the work in-progress at that time. Then the safety officer gave us a safety induction about every single aspect of danger we might encounter on site and how to deal with each case. After that we saw the piles being erected, all the steel bars being placed crossing one another in an organized manner, and finally we tried to build a wall using hollow concrete blocks and a cementitious mixture. Then we passed by the laboratory where some tests on concrete blocks were implemented. In the meeting room, Mr. Chris Battle (commercial manager) was there to inform us about all forms of preliminary costs since the project is at its early stage among which we can mention the costs of scaffolding, site offices, labor camps, water and electricity on site and many others.

On the second day, we were given drawings of piles and their caps along with the bar bending schedule. We located each bar on the drawings and then we went on site to actually see them. It was a very productive day to relate what we saw on the drawings to what is on site.