Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

….wait no, paint any undulating piece of ground yellow just in case you might trip over it!!

The first half of this week was spent making sure you could walk round the site blindfolded without tripping over, getting hit by a piling rig, falling in a hole or snort asbestos.  The HSE were coming to visit on Wed morning and it resembled a visit from the CGS or the Queen.  On Mon we had a management walk around with our H&S Advisor to pick up on a list of improvement points which were mostly just site tidiness and pedestrian segregation.  For such a big but also constrained site it wasn’t too bad.

I finally got my fence moved 3m and the GPR Survey team arrived to survey as much of the embankment as they could.  This week I was able to get them in the gate I wanted to and I even organised somewhere for them to park which was an improvement on last week’s fiasco.  We also made some progress with the second mystery pipe however not as much as we hoped.  The Carillion Utilities team came out to tap the pipe on Thursday so on Wed afternoon I requested the contractors uncover a straight part of the pipe.  Unfortunately they encountered a second bend and then ran out of trench box to dig further.  The utilities guys decided to have a go at tapping it anyway but in the process they broke their drill!  So that left us with a mystery pipe with the start of a hole in it, 6m down in a trench box, 3m away from the Network Rail fence and 1m from our access road.  Why are things never easy?  Hopefully tomorrow I will find out that they fixed their drill and came back on Sat to show that it was empty?

I am also in a similar position to Rich Hall working for the management contractors rather than the sub-contractors on the coal-face.  At first I thought the closest I was getting to technical engineering was building my Ikea bookcase and installing mud-guards to my commuting bike.  However I have taken on the role of being the Section Engineer in charge of utilities and the Network Rail Access Road and I am now starting to ‘identify and solve engineering problems’.  I have already found a problem with my second HV substation and I will probably write more about that the end of this week.  My role also includes checking Risk Assessments and Method Statements (RAMS) and Inspection and Test Plans (ITPs).  Again I feel a bit like the Sqn 2IC who is collecting and checking the Troopy’s paperwork and regularly inspecting their work on the ground.  I was due to sign off and inspect the HV substation during the pre-pour checks on Fri afternoon but they weren’t ready in time and I had to catch my lift to Bedford to finally rescue my van from the garage it had been at for 2 months.  Hopefully I will get to do the other concrete pour next week.  I am also planning on spending a bit of time on the ground with the sub-contractor’s engineers to do more of the detailed engineering on the ground.

This week I did have another ‘debate’ with the site management company about whether I was working on their land or not.  This time they told me that we needed to make part of it a pedestrian walkway even though that was what they stopped me doing last week.  Apparently it is clearly on the drawing that I have never seen before!  I can see I am going to have some fun over land management!  One of them also advised me that I needed to keep an eye on the contractors working safely.  He pointed out that there were no mushroom caps on the protruding parts of the clamps holding the formwork together even though the guys were still building it.  He also said that there should be edge protection on the shuttering as they were climbing onto the 1.2m high formwork whilst still building it.  How on earth you are meant to edge protect something so low I am not sure and seeing as falling from it wasn’t in the RAMS I don’t think anyone saw it as a risk.  In my eyes they were not doing anything wrong or putting themselves in danger so without covering every  labourer in cotton wool or body armour I am not sure how far we are meant to go!  I am now slightly concerned with my approach to digging up the tree trunk in my garden, I might install edge protection to the 50cm excavation  (that is battered to a safe angle) to ensure that the neighbours cat doesn’t fall in over the week!!