TNT Distribution Centre

The building

The TNT Distribution Centre at Erskine Park NSW, is a state of the art ‘super hub’ which achieves a ‘4 Star Green’ rating from the Green Building Council of Australia. The office/warehouse component itself is over 30,000m² in floor area and has been purpose designed and constructed with the view of modernising TNT’s ability to support service quality and cost efficiency when handling domestic and international shipments. TNT’s key focus with the super hub facility has been to streamline processes and implement some of the most advanced parcel sortation systems technologically available.

The Erskine Park super hub includes Australia’s first high speed automatic sortation system for freight items exceeding 1.5 metres in length and 30kg in mass. The new facility accommodates an automatic pallet deconsolidation process which reduces the need for manual handling, thus reducing OH&S risks. This facility will be able to process up to 25,000 parcels per hour with the use of the automated sortation technology which overall, increases speed and accuracy, enabling TNT to provide optimum service to our customers.

The approach

The fire safety engineering approach analysed fire and life safety provisions in two (2) of the main buildings on the site.

The first building being the office/warehouse building which comprises a floor area of approximately 30,000m² (excluding the gatehouse and truck wash/maintenance bay) and building volume exceeding 108,000m³. The other main office building comprises a total floor area of 1,000m² as well as an open deck car park accommodating a total of 350 car spaces.

From a fire engineering perspective, a series of egress, smoke hazard management and sprinkler system related design issues were substantiated utilising holistic, quantitative fire safety engineering methods.