Outstanding Project Award Winner: Plaquemines LNG Driven Pile Megaproject-PPT Presentation

PPT Presentation

Pdf Summary

The presentation introduces Cajun, a privately held piling and construction company founded in 1973, with 3,200 employees and offices in Louisiana and Texas. Its services include driven, helical, augered cast-in-place, drilled displacement and drilled-shaft piles, as well as retaining structures. The company emphasizes safety and reports a declining total recordable incident rate in recent years.<br /><br />Cajun’s work at the 632-acre Plaquemines LNG project in Louisiana supported a facility designed to export up to 20 million metric tonnes of LNG annually. Across 15 scopes from March 2022 to August 2024, the project involved 32 cranes, six predrill rigs, up to 250 Cajun employees, 575,000 labor hours and 18,300 installed piles. Work included pipe and precast piles, sheet-pile floodwalls, floodgates, cofferdams and drilled shafts.<br /><br />Key challenges included hurricane-season deadlines, difficult access and logistics, geotechnical uncertainty, and complex crane operations. Cajun responded with design-build and turnkey services, custom pile templates, camera systems to improve operator visibility, and extensive static and dynamic load testing. A mid-project testing program completed 40 static load tests in eight days, helping address capacity and quality concerns, convert more than a quarter of the remaining production piles, and accelerate the schedule.<br /><br />The presentation attributes project success to early planning and contractor involvement, clear communication, field adaptability, constructability reviews, value engineering and alignment with overall project goals. It also highlights employee safety, mentoring, training, morale and listening to field teams as central to Cajun’s approach.

Keywords

Cajun

piling

construction

Plaquemines LNG

Louisiana

safety

driven piles

drilled shafts

load testing

design-build