All trains from Victoria CANCELLED…….
Well today I was in my element utilising my military skills and my search advisor knowledge! It involved 5 police cars, 3 fire engines, an ambulance, the evacuation of the site, closure of Battersea Heliport and all train lines coming from Victoria. At around 1430 Hrs one of the engineers came up to the office saying that the piling rig had dug something up that could be UXO. Being the only person that vaguely knew one end of a bomb from the other I agreed to go and give my expert guestimate of whether we should be running for cover.
On arriving at the piling rig I found this:
It was around 150mm diameter all the way down with no tail fins or pointy ends so I was 90% sure it wasn’t going to start ticking at us. I took some photos to brief the services and then cleared my area of responsibility of operatives. As the site was getting evacuated I found the piling rig operators and used the search advisor questioning technique to find out what they were doing when they found it and what actually happened. The rig was drilling the pre-bore for the casing when it hit a metal obstruction about 1.5m BGL. On moving the auger forwards and up, it uncovered the metal object that started hissing. At that point the rig crew stopped work and promptly left the area to raise the concern. We got the site evacuated and after around 45 minutes 4 police cars turned up.
I ended up briefing the police and showing the photos with the senior construction manager and an ex-RE policeman went down to have a look. He confirmed our suspicions that is was more likely to be an oxygen or acetylene cylinder and the police decided to establish a 400m cordon. With the train lines around 30m away and the cylinder pointing straight at them and the flats the other side of them-all the trains from Victoria were cancelled and the flats started to be evacuated. Finally the fire brigade turned up and I had my briefing map and photos ready. It reminded me of the old 4Cs operation we got taught on PDT for Iraq. After seeing the photos they reduced the exclusion zone to 200m and they sent some guys with breathing apparatus to go and check it out despite the fact we had been stood next to it over an hour before!
To cut a long story short, they confirmed what we had told them and went with the construction manager’s plan of attaching some strops to it to support it and reversing the auger to lift it from the hole. Low and behold it worked without going bang and everyone went home for tea and medals and the trains set off again.
Here’s the culprit:
We are not sure exactly where it came from but it looks like it was between our pile mat and another piece of terram. It may have been buried during the backfilling of a previous dig or development prior to us being on site. It is likely to throw up a whole world of debate about whether excavation and piling on the site is safe as if they had struck the cylinder straight on it could have exploded. It will also be interesting to see whether the client ends up footing a bill for the closure of the railway line or whether incidents like this outside our control are excluded. One thing I will be implementing on site is a proper laminated briefing map and some advice on how to control incidents. I was amazed with how many people rushed to take the afternoon off, leaving a couple of people to deal with everything. Even the police and fire brigade didn’t really seem to take command and control as I would have expected them to do. I am more institutionalised than I thought!
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Angela
Another quite day at the office. As you say everyone just wanted to leave site. Quite rightly so everyone should be thankful that it was not anything. Mind you with such a large site in London it is good that you are not digging up UXO etc
Are you boring under the railway yet?
Kind Regards
Neil
Just out of interest….
Was a ground penetrating radar scan of the site applied?
When you RE persagaes do find a cllyindrical thing …are there obvious ways of distinguishing old pile casing , old gas bottles and the like from UXO….like…?
Perhaps..depth of embedment, orientation some measure of whether there’s a ‘filling’ ?
A full UXO survey of the site (desk study) was carried out and there is a fair chance of digging something up. At the start of the bulk dig an ex-RE Bomb Disposal Officer was on site to ask questions and conduct tool box talks. Not all of the site was GPRS’d and it is unlikely that it would have been picked up unless in the top 2m of virgin soil (this site is far from being virgin!).
The way we distinguished it was mostly mine and the senior construction managers opinion that was backed up by the ex-RE policeman! I thought it was too long and thin, with no rounded edges, tail fins or a percussion cap and the casing was also too thin. The construction manager thought it looked like a gas canister too so between us we were 90% sure that’s what it was. It was the police who have to make the final call after we had evacuated the site anyway.
Neil-as for the pipe-jacking well that is another story! The HV cables have been put in the wrong place so we can’t fit the launch shaft in! It is now apparent that even if they were put in the right place, we still couldn’t fit the launch shaft in as the designers didn’t account for the size of the sheet piles or propping system! So we are currently trying to move HV cables!! Hopefully my next blog will have an update on where we stand with that!