water & sewerage
BARHALE-MAIL
BEST PRACTICE
Best Practice - Signing facility
Being able to provide rapid response maintenance and repair services with minimal
disruption to other stakeholders such as road vehicles and pedestrians is aided
by being able to rapidly produce appropriate signs. Barhale has established an
in house sign producing facility to ensure that signs can be tailored to specific
projects cost effectively and speedily.
The plant is based in Walsall but provides a service country wide. It produces all Barhale's road signs, vehicle livery and logos for clothing. Specialist, state of the art equipment produces lettering and images that can be cut and transferred onto vinyl surfaces. We started to produce our own livery for vehicles after tendering for a recent phase of BT work and we now provide sign writing services for other companies.
Best Practice - New slurry system boosts on-site recycling
Barhale aims to be the most environmentally responsible company in the business
and a new slurry separation system which we have developed is proof that environmental
best practice can save money.
The system works by using mud additives to allow seamless mining through mixed ground. The additives are cleaner and more effective than conventional bentonite slurries and can be used in smaller quantities. Developed by Barhale's Iseki tunnelling team and Manvers Engineering, the system also helps to significantly reduce costs of removing liquid waste by tanker.
The performance of the system has been monitored on numerous microtunnelling drives. In each case there was no need to remove liquid waste by tanker, fully complying with Barhale's zero dumping objective.
The system uses a three tier stacking device containing an agitated base tank, a desander pod including primary separation equipment and hydro-cyclones. third tier houses a high speed decanting centrifuge and a flucculation package.
The centrifuge is carefully dosed with polymers and is continuously monitored during the slurry separation process. The polymers allow centrates to be produced that contain less than 20 parts per million suspended solids and spoil, suitable for landfill or disposal on site.
Best Practice - Safety
Safety is at the top of the agenda for our managers and we constantly search
for innovative approaches to improving our safety performance. Considerable progress
has been made as a result of new measures adopted and our accident rate has improved
markedly, especially when compared to the rapid growth in man hours worked on
Barhale sites - from 600,000 hours a year to 2,000,000 in the three years to 2002.
Directly employing our workforce where possible has been an important factor in managing safety. Having the ability to train operatives in-house plays a significant role in raising safety awareness, through induction training as well as our on-going efforts to maintain a high profile for safety across the company.
The introduction of Safety Coaches is a Barhale innovation which is starting to spread to other organisations. We introduced a Safety Coach two years ago at a tunnelling project and we now have four regionally dedicated full time coaches visiting sites where they hold toolbox talks on safety, look for potential safety hazards and encourage people to think about safety and act safely.
Safety Coaches have been introduced on the HMB Alliance, a joint venture of which Barhale is a part, delivering the United Utilities AMP3 Framework Agreement, and a lot of interest has been shown by clients and other suppliers in the construction industry.
Another recent initiative is the introduction of our Safety Focus newsletter which is sent to all Barhale employees at their home addresses as well as to our subcontractors and clients. Safety Focus aims to highlight general and specific safety issues, ensuring that mistakes made are learned from. It also reports on what safety measures are working, spreading knowledge of what constitutes good safety practice.
As to the future, Barhale will be pursuing new and innovative approaches to further improve our safety performance. These include breakfast briefings, better induction processes,full occupational health screening, developing and nurturing the positive safety culture, and integration (where possible) of our safety, environmental and quality (SEQ) management systems - which will also utilise our electronic SEQ software.
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