Underground: Tour Barangaroo’s bustling basement beneath city
IT is the city operating beneath the city — a hub of activity 24/7. The Sunday Telegraph has been given exclusive access to the elaborate labyrinth of rooms and corridors beneath the Barangaroo precinct. TAKE THE TOUR.
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BENEATH Sydney lies an underground city operating 24/7.
Stretching deep below Barangaroo, an elaborate labyrinth of rooms and corridors are powering and protecting three skyscrapers and six buildings.
While more than 21,000 people work in the International Towers above, the basement bustles with activity as security guards monitor 500-plus cameras and engineers maintain temperatures between 21 and 24 degrees Celsius across 140 floors.
Standing underneath Tower Two, Lendlease’s Barangaroo general manager of operations James Peterson said more than 200 people call the basement “home”.
“It’s a very active underground city,” Mr Peterson said.
“This is enormous — the basement is 77,000 square metres which is as big as this building is vertically.”
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With more than 400 rooms across two-levels, the daily operations driving Sydney’s newest hub are hidden from view, from the 1100 bike racks to the harbour water keeping the precinct cool.
“Everyone really enjoys the ground plane of Barangaroo and it’s not just by accident,” Mr Peterson said. “It’s because all this stuff has been taken away from getting in the way.”
In the security control room, a state-of-the-art system alerts guards each time a fire and safety door opens, pinpointing the exact location by turning red.
Further down in the operations room, engineers monitor the one million live data points coming in every five seconds including the massive airconditioning system.
Mr Peterson said “in a typical building they would be going from floor to floor”.
A centralised mail room allows couriers to drop off and go rather than use Barangaroo’s 135 lifts to deliver parcels while more 800 deliveries are made each day at the loading dock.
Cleaners and contractors can only access keys from cabinets that require their thumbprint to open.
“It gives them the keys they’re only allowed for that day for their shift,” Mr Peterson said.
On level two, the District Cooling Plant chills water pumped from the harbour to aircondition buildings. At full capacity, the sea water system can pump two and a half Olympic swimming pools every hour.
“We’ve got eight different filters so we catch everything from jellyfish to plastic bags,” Mr Peterson said.
“We are using harbour water so we don’t have cooling towers on the top of the office buildings — they are all reserved for solar.”
The technologically advanced basement also has its own recycled water plant and waste and recycling room.
In the past two years, Barangaroo has diverted more than 2400 tonnes of waste from landfill, the equivalent weight of 546 elephants.
Mr Peterson said the basement had become a “benchmark” for international property developers wanting to replicate the underground operation.
“When you pull together big, complex urban regeneration projects like this, by just putting buildings together doesn’t make it work,” he said.
The basement’s cooling plant, recycled water plant and electricity network will also power future skyscrapers including Crown Casino and One Sydney Harbour — three new residential towers expected to open by 2023.
Today Sydneysiders will also have the opportunity to view Barangaroo from above.
The Sydney Open event will allow the public to tour two of Barangaroo’s skyscrapers — level 38 on Tower Three and level 44, 45 and 46 on Tower One.
For more information and to buy passes, visit sydneylivingmuseums.com.au