FCC Construcción

Site Support Management

Site Support Management includes the Bridge and Structure Service, the Geotechnical and Road Infrastructure Service and the International Project Coordination Department.

Bridge and Structure Service

This service contains the Bridge Department, the Building Structure Department, the Civil Engineering Works Structure Department and the Architecture Department. Its function is to provide projects with technical support in design development as well as in building procedure consultancy, within each department's realm of expertise.

Geotechnical and Road Infrastructure Service

This service contains the Geotechnical Department, the Geology Department, the Tunnel Department and the Road Department. It has the necessary resources to find solutions for the different terrain-related problems projects involve, such as foundations, major earthmoving work and underground construction. It also works on optimising the layout of linear projects, such as roads and canals.

International Project Coordination Department

The International Project Coordination Department holds responsibility for coordinating major international projects that require the participation of the different departments and services belonging to the Office of the Deputy Corporate Manager for Technical Services and outsourced engineering firms.

Leading Work

The list below contains some of the finest representatives of the kinds of projects and site assistance Site Support Management deals in.

Bridges

Badajoz Bridge. This is a cable-stayed bridge with 136-, 88- and 32-metre spans, reached by a viaduct that has six 32-metre spans. The deck is 23 metres wide, with two two-lane roadways, a central reservation, bicycle lanes and pedestrian pavements. The staying system is made up of 28 cables in a fan-shaped central-plane array, anchored to an 81-metre-tall A-shaped pylon.

Construction of viaducts using precast segments. Site Support Management's Bridge Department has performed specific building procedures enabling in-house systems to be developed for the construction of viaducts using precast segments, either span by span or in a progressive cantilever assembly. These systems have enabled a number of viaducts to be built, such as Despeñaperros Viaduct, Piedrafita Viaduct, Manzanal Viaduct and Río España Viaduct.

Navia Viaduct. To cross the plain on the Navia relief road, a 905-metre-long viaduct was built with two 160-metre long main spans with bowstring arches and two approach viaducts (341 and 244 metres long). All decks were built entirely with precast segments.

Vidin Bridge. Straddling the border between Bulgaria and Romania, this bridge crosses the Danube River. It is used for both wheeled vehicles and trains. The main section, an extradosed continuous bridge, is made up of three 180-metre spans with two 130-metre lateral compensation spans. The Bulgarian shore has an approach viaduct with eight spans, each up to 80 metres across, and a railway approach viaduct with 40-metre spans. The main bridge and the approach viaducts are designed using precast segments widened with overhanging slabs braced with struts, to make a total width of 31.35 metres.

Offices

Puerta de Europa. The Puerta de Europa skyscrapers in Madrid set a record in inclined building construction. They are 25 storeys (115 metres) high and lean toward one another at an angle of 14 degrees, which means 28 metres of each building overhang the street, and the ground floor and roof of either skyscraper overlap by barely three metres.

Torre Caja Madrid. This is at present the tallest building in Spain, standing 250 metres tall. It has five basement levels, 34 storeys of offices, eight storeys of mechanical plant and an auditorium suspended inside the vast lobby. Structurally, it is conceived as three independent buildings attached to the vertical cores that serve as sole supports. The storeys are practically entirely open plan, measuring 14 x 18 metres across. The composite floor structure sits on top of a metal structure and vertical cores of reinforced concrete. Extraordinary auxiliary equipment and hoisting equipment were used to build the skyscraper.

Cultural Buildings

Museum of Royal Collections. Located right next to La Almudena Cathedral in Madrid, the Museum of Royal Collections is a huge, white concrete structure containing large halls for permanent and temporary displays of the collections belonging to Patrimonio Nacional, the Spanish national heritage institution. Before the museum could be built, a enormous hole had to be excavated at the foot of the cathedral. A retaining wall of piles was built to hold the earth back, with up to seven rows of high-capacity active soil anchors.

Roads and Motorways

M-30 tunnel project, Madrid. FCC participated in several sections of the project to redirect the main ring road around the city of Madrid underground. Here the company had to solve complex problems of construction design and create building procedures compatible with keeping the road open to traffic.

Railway Infrastructure

Sol Local Train Station, Madrid. Madrid's new Sol-Gran Vía Station was built as part of the local train system's new connection between Atocha Station and Chamartín Station. It consists in a huge platform cavern 207 metres long, 27 metres wide and 17 metres high, and a vast concourse leading off to the station entrances and connections to the Metro system. To build the station, the company had to deal with multiple interferences with utility tunnels and Metro tunnels, plus it had to meter earth movements exhaustively, since a good portion of the cavern was built beneath buildings.

Metro system expansion work. Within the plans to expand the underground railway systems of different cities (including Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao and Alicante), FCC has engaged in some very different types of underground jobs, for which it has needed to develop a wide range of designs and procedures for underground construction and underground site control (tunnel boring with TBMs, cut-and-cover tunnelling, etc.). One of the most technically complex jobs was the expansion of Sol Station on Line 3 of the Madrid Metro.