Gas & Air – Lugging loads in a Lockdown

Well Saturday 28th March was an exciting day here at Truck & Crane.

First of all we were happy to be involved with the delivery of steelwork manufactured by our friends at Southdown Construction for the air-conditioning and treatment upgrades at Princess Royal Hospital, Haywards Heath (sorry for lack of piccys, for obvious reasons movement on site was restricted).

The other mission was a little less routine. We had a call at about 16.30 hrs on Friday from the SGN Major Works team. There was a major incident in Bexley where excavations near a 30 inch gas main had resulted in contact and a massive leak. Because the line fed 45,000 homes across S.E London and Kent full of families isolating themselves, turning it off to repair just the damaged section was not an option. Instead, we were tasked with collecting over 200 metres of large diameter 500 mm PE pipe and delivering in to site. It had to be gathered up from locations as far apart as South Godstone, Sussex to Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire.

It was all delivered to site by Barry Huntley & Graham Hayes for the experts to install and subsequently divert around the problem. The team did use their remote control excavators to carry out a standard ‘bag drop’ of a 1 tonne bag of aggregate to stem the flow. Unfortunately, as you can see in the photos below, the force of gas was such that this merely resulted in the tonne bag being blown straight up into the air and landing nearly 20 metres away! Just the sound of all that gas groaning out of the ground is scary enough.

Pictures courtesy of Graham Hayes