The Nova Centre is such a large excavation site that it made me wonder how it compares to other well known excavation sites. Here is the Nova Scotia Webcams view of the Nova Centre -
http://www.novascotiawebcams.com/hal...struction.html
For comparison, the side by side comparison (image below) of the two former World Trade towers and Nova Centre seems to indicate that both World Trade towers could have fit on the Nova Centre site (in fact, almost four NY World Trade towers could fit).
Based on my measurements from Google Earth, the site to be excavated is 290 feet x 330 feet. Based on an average excavation depth of 50 feet that would work out to 4,785,000 cubic feet (178,000 cubic yards) of rocky fill. If the density of the excavated fill is similar to concrete (about 150 lb per cubic foot) then that would be 718,000,000 lb or about 360,000 tons of fill to be excavated.
Another comparison is to the recently completed Dallas Cowboys Stadium. It was about 14 acres, which was excavated to a maximum of 50 feet deep (I am not sure of the average depth, but based on pictures it appears to be less than 50 feet on average). Based on this link -
http://www.constructionequipmentguid...e-Future/7849/ - 750,000 cubic yards of fill was removed for the Dallas Cowboys Stadium. So the Nova Centre is about 1/4 as much as the Dallas Cowboys Stadium excavation. In my opinion, the Nova Centre is certainly in the major leagues as far as excavation goes (I wonder how the Nova Centre excavation compares with the Scotia Square excavation?)
(source: screen shots from Bing Maps)