Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

With nearly half a million cases reported globally in the last 24 hours, coronavirus continues to present a direct health risk to many people across the world. Despite this, some countries including the UK are fortunate enough to be confident that they have seen the worst of the pandemic within their borders. As a result, much discussion in recent months has been focussed on recovery and getting life back to “normal”.

Across the world, many countries including China, The USA, France, Australia and The UK have announced significant infrastructure investment as we go forward into a “post-pandemic” world. This will lead to a rise in demand for basic construction materials such as steel, cement, timber and some plastics.

Supply chains have been stressed significantly over the past two years not only by restrictions to movement but by reduced outputs, political events such as Brexit and incidents like the blockage of the Suez Canal. Scarcity of construction materials is already beginning to take hold. For instance, on my site attachment, concerns over a shortage of steel fibre reinforcement (SFR) for sprayed concrete lining of a tunnel shaft are beginning to materialise.

Fortunately, we are able to revert to using steel mesh in lieu of the SFR for the most part but this is more time consuming to construct and leads to increased safety risks from additional working at height, more heavy crane lifts and hot works. What’s more is that a neighbouring team constructing a diaphragm wall on the same site is beginning to see shortage in availability of mesh which could scupper the contingency plan for the shaft.

If SFR and mesh stocks dry up, this situation has the potential to halt progress risking significant delays across the programme. One way of mitigating this might be to call upon the designers to revise specifications and offer alternatives to keep works going without too much increase in cost but the options are no doubt limited for a project that is already well under construction.

Time will tell if design change will be made necessary on my site, but it led me to wonder if anyone else had experienced materials shortages on their attachments (phase 2 or 3 – contractor or design house) and what might have been done to overcome the issue. Can anyone share some of their experience on this matter?