Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

No blog last week as I was on leave with nothing significant to report other than an interview for my design placement at Ramboll UK.

It was been a slow week for personal involvement, and therefore a short blog. 

With the first slab poured on my block just before I went on Easter leave the transformation in the time I was away was significant, starter bars had become walls, starter bars for columns were still awaiting design details which made things a little awkward, the M&E fairies were still trying to magic holes in walls by the power of though alone.  Most of Tue and Wed were spent setting up a significant retaining wall that when poured will mean that we can backfill and progress at a much faster rate; as much of the areas awaiting groundworks are at a higher level posing a problem for formworking and working at height.  One thing that has become very clear is, the instant a slab is hard enough to walk on every man on site want a little bit of space on it, either the carpenters, the steel fixers or just for storage.  It is impossible to keep a slab clear and no matter what you put in place to try and control the space it won’t control the people, short of being there constantly there is no way to stop it from degrading into a mass of men and materiel.

The most interesting thing that happened this week was to go on a day long crane rescue course.  The background to this is about the requirement in both Working at Height Regulations and LOLER to have a rescue plan and competent people to conduct the rescue.  The emergency service can’t be relied upon to recover people from tower cranes as in general a standard firefighter lacks the techniques and equipment to do so and the urban search and rescue teams aren’t a continually formed unit and therefore are slow to respond.  So it falls down to 3 people who have done a 1 day course to drag a large man from a small cab up a tall tower.  The system is quite easy to use and doesn’t require any knowledge of knots or rope systems.  Our site has been operating without an evacuation plan for the cranes, one for working at height in general is in place and now it will probably fall to me to write the rescue plan.  The one question it has raised in my mind is how we plan for the use of the dems harness or ISHK on exercise, never have I been briefed on a resuce plan for someone that falls from a dems bridge and dangles from a lanyard and as an exercise conducting officer I’ve never used it although I would not have planned for that eventuality, thoughts from the floor?

Our artesian water problems continue and have been exacerbated by attempts to stem the flow whilst I was on leave.  The rather unscientific solution of dig down further and chuck a load of concrete on it has failed and now the flow of water has increased.  Today will see a visit from RSK (the environmental and ground consultants) who will see what could be done, I don’t believe there is one personally, the nature of the ground gives multiple routes to the surface for the water through the fissured clay that sits below my block.  A chance conversation with someone who was involved in the foundations of the BBC Radio Solent building next door has revealed that they had the same problem, an uncapped borehole that continued to flow under artesian conditions, and in the end they resorted to what was in effect a French drain under the slab to the nearest point where the water could be disposed of.

Rich