A sunrise photo of an excavator silhouetted against the backdrop of Turitea Wind Farm has won Marton local Tamarisk Howe top prize in the Summer round of the EPIC Photo Competition.
The Mills Albert employee snapped the photo on a clear morning as an excavator worked to widen a section of North Range Road in Manawatū. The work was being done in preparation for the transport of 65-metre-long wind turbine blades to the wind farm, being developed in the Tararua Range above Palmerston North
“We were about halfway through the road widening project at that point, excavating and backfilling gullies to enable the trucks carrying blades to travel through,” Tamarisk says.
The road widening project has since finished but construction of the wind farm is ongoing. Once complete, Mercury’s Turitea Wind Farm will be New Zealand’s largest wind farm, with a total capacity of 222MW.
Tamarisk’s day to day role with Mills Albert is managing logistics but she was assisting with environmental monitoring on the Turitea Wind Farm access road job to ensure silt fences were in place and any contaminated material was contained.
She says she enjoys working in civil construction because of her supportive team and the fact she gets to work outdoors a lot of the time. She is the fourth member of her family to join the Mills Albert team, and now works there alongside her husband, father in law, and oldest daughter.
“My husband Jason is a supervisor with the Mills Albert forestry division and he suggested I put my application in when a role came up with the company a few years ago. I’ve been in civil construction for about two years now and I absolutely love it. I couldn’t go back to an indoor job.”
Another perk of the job is that she can often take her friendly pit bull Charlie with her during the day, she laughs. Charlie’s a good traveller and enjoys keeping Tamarisk company on her many work trips between Whanganui and Levin.
The Summer round of the EPIC Photo Competition attracted high-quality entries from civil construction workers across New Zealand.
As the competition winner, Tamarisk receives a $300 gift card from Z Energy, a scale model of some of the EPIC technology used in infrastructure from TDX, and an EPIC t-shirt and jacket.
Get ready for the next round of the EPIC Photo Competition
The next themed round of our 2022 EPIC Photo Competition will open later this month. Keep an eye on our webpage at www.epicwork.nz/photocomp for the theme of the next round, the entry deadline and a rundown of some of the great prizes on offer.
In the meantime, sign up for our monthly EPIC newsletters for updates and feature articles about some of the amazing opportunities on offer in Aotearoa’s infrastructure industry.
