History
It was in 1973 when Graeme Harker, owner and founder of Harker Underground Construction Limited, first established himself as a small family business providing general civil construction services in the capacity of Main Contractor or subcontractor for earthworks, drainage, gabion structures, shaft construction and multi-plate culverts.
Graeme’s involvement in the installation of large diameter pipe by traditional tunnelling methods was the mechanism which changed the key business focus of the existing company, and ultimately the name of his company.
In 1988, Harker Underground Construction was formed, a specialist contractor providing microtunnelling and pipejacking construction services - still utilising the old ‘tried and true’ traditional methods but now introducing their own tunnelling plant and equipment as seen and used overseas.
Now the cost of buying, even hiring, tunnel boring machines (TBM) from overseas manufacturers and suppliers was not a viable option for a relatively small company, let alone when competing for work in the open market against the traditional open cut pipe installation method. The only other feasible option was to ‘produce your own’ tunnel boring plant and equipment which is exactly what Graeme did.
In conjunction with Tunnelling Technologies Limited (TunnelTEQ), a sister company, Harker Underground Construction ventured into the design and manufacture of TBMs and systems (e.g. slurry separation plants, software and machine guidance systems) in New Zealand. Graeme’s vision of providing tunnel boring plant and equipment - on par and equivalent to equipment available on the international market – using ‘kiwi’ ingenuity had been realised.
Since 1988, Harker Underground Construction has installed, using their own TBMs and systems, kilometres of pipe ranging from 450mm to 3000mm in diameter, at depths varying from 1.5 to 24 metres below ground level under CBD areas, motorways, main arterial roads, existing buildings / dwellings, railway lines and Greenfield sites.
Moving into a niche market in New Zealand is always associated with taking on a significant amount of risk however, for Graeme and his company Harker Underground Construction it looks as though that initial gamble has paid off with an increase in the number of projects undertaken each year specifying a requirement for pipelines to be installed using microtunnelling and pipejacking methods.
