Peak practice

On a remote site in the Peak District tests and experiments are being carried out in aid of the UK’s safety. Follow the winding road uphill out of the tourist haven of Buxton and on an exposed hilltop a new facility is about to open for the Health and Safety Laboratory (HSL). Whenever there is a train crash or industrial accident the parts will be brought here to determine what went wrong and prevent a repetition.

HSL is an independent agency of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE); its aim is to reduce workplace risks. As well as post-mortems of large-scale incidents, its role includes testing of personal protective equipment, ventilation systems, microbiology and explosions.

The new facility has been built to rationalise the HSL Estate. It currently has two sites – one at Buxton, the second in Sheffield. Both of these needed updating and it was decided to bring the two together at Buxton. Ken Lawson, operations manager for m&e contractor SES explains: “Because of some of the work they carry out, explosions and the like, they can’t do that in town centres. We’re putting all their focus under the one roof, which allows all the departments to integrate.”

Testing designs

The 22 000 m2 facility is split into four key areas: laboratories; corporate and support areas; an engineering block; and a contained experimentals area. These are linked by an internal street. “It’s like a combination of projects,” explains Lawson, “It’s like walking round a university in some areas; a hospital, because of the labs; and it’s also in other areas like walking round a very upmarket office block.”

SES has been involved from the start. In July 1999 it was one of five m&e contractors invited to competitively tender to the preferred bidder. Having won the contract it’s role was to develop the design and install, test and commission all m&e services throughout the site. “We worked extremely closely with the funders and everybody involved at that stage and the client,” says Lawson.

“The whole project has been built off of space data sheets,” explains Steve Harvey, project engineer for the engineering block. There is basically a datasheet for each individual area that states how it will be built, what is in it, how it will be serviced, etc.

“Most of the design of this project in isolation is not complex,” explains Lawson. “There are elements that are, but there’s just a lot of it. It’s a big job and very fast track.” SES began on site in April 2003 and the project is scheduled for completion at the end of September. “The bulk of our installation was over 15 months from a standing start,” states Lawson. “There is £20.5 million of it, so that’s £1.5 million/month almost and that is a huge amount of turnover for most businesses, never mind a site.”

With such values to cope with, SES took a firm decision to include resources to manage the project upfront. “One of the key positions was the design manager,” explains Lawson. Steve Atkins, one of the firm’s project managers was employed to co-ordinate the various parts of the design and deliver the final specifications to site. SES’s design department carried out much of the detailing, with specialists employed for some areas such as the laboratories.

Drawings were distributed and stored on an extranet archive system, rather than on paper. As well as ensuring that all parties were working with the latest information, this proved a huge cost-saver: “We must have saved £30 000 worth of paper,” Lawson confirms.

A major part of the design management process was the early involvement of the supply chain. In 2000 SES held an open day for its suppliers, who set up demonstration stands at the firm’s manufacturing plant in York with samples of the products proposed for use on the project. “All the engineers essentially came up and just mingled and got to know the suppliers,” explains Matthew Way md of cable basket supplier Cablofil. This helped promote relations between the teams and allowed suppliers to offer insights into their products.

Lawson reasons: “The sooner that a product is put into the design the better, because it may well be that there are certain things that we can do with it which wouldn’t come under the standard method of detail.

“[The manufacturer] may come in and say ‘you can do this’ and if we can get that into the design we recognise the full benefit then of the product we’re using.”

Cablofil is on SES’s preferred suppliers list. Using this was important to the firm: “Nowadays more and more clients are interested in hiring a supply chain.” The cable basket was important to detail early as while the firm subcontracted some specialist work it installed the entire containment system itself. Lawson explains: “Programme-wise you are always putting containment in on site before you actually need the specialists, so you’d be extending peoples’ contract periods for the containment period.”

A Cablofil employee spent time on site with the installers, demonstrating how the product could be most efficiently used. “We can actually work with the engineers and save the project money by going back to the consultant and talking about it,” stresses Way.

On-site services

If the challenge of servicing the mix of facilities involved were not enough, the m&e contractor was given a rather large obstacle on its first week in the job. Lawson explains: “In the week that we signed the contract [the electricity supplier] pulled out and said they couldn’t give us power on this site. United Utilities had to come 4·5 km with their power supply. Then we found out that they couldn’t generate it at 11 000 V, they generate it at 6600 V, so we had to change all the transformers without losing the site.” Dual-wound transformers were installed in the early hours of a Sunday morning to minimise disruption, all changeovers being completed without loss of power.

The first job to be tackled from the m&e side was to upgrade the services. Before this could happen around 30 buildings had to be demolished as although the site is around 550 acres, the flattest area already held old HSL buildings, with fragmented services covering the site. The HSL staff were moved into other buildings on the site then the area cleared for build. A huge ring main and road encircling the build area was constructed. Under and alongside this runs a 3-m wide trench containing the main services.

The ring main feeds two substations sited diagonally opposite each other outside the building. Lawson explains: “The substations were one of the first things that we built. We actually brought forward all of the electrical work on the substations so that we had power and could then tap into the power when we required it. Originally the substations were within the facility – putting them outside allowed us to do that.”

These feed a central energy centre housing the boiler and chillers that supply the entire site. Air handling units are sited in seven plantrooms local to the areas they serve. There is also a significant amount of lab gases, most in bottle stores with manifolds and auto-changeover.

One of the more unusual parts of the installation was the universal test bed (utb). Installed by Shepherd Construction it is around 4 m wide by 15 m long and comprises a series of steel sleepers encircled by a hydraulic ring main. It is on the UTB that large equipment can be clamped and failures re-enacted by applying preset pressures.

A lot of the equipment at HSL is hydraulic, necessitating a huge hydraulic plant and underfloor network. “Hydraulics was the biggest thing for us [in the engineering block],” confirms Harvey. “To do it took a lot of meetings. There are not a lot of firms in the UK that do this size of hydraulic ring main.” Once the Sheffield facility closes, this will be the UK’s only UTB.

Rural working

Despite the seemingly remote location of the site, access did not prove a problem. ‘A’ roads to major cities such as Leeds and Manchester run fairly close to Buxton and HSL has its own snow plough to cope with the worst weather. But the build was lucky in terms of weather. At foundation stage and during steelwork erection the area basked in its driest year on record.

As storage space on site was limited, SES worked closely with wholesalers and subcontractors to operate a just-in-time delivery system. Prefabrication of pipework was used where possible and much of the ductwork was made off site.

One of the larger problems was accommodation for operatives. Local labour was used, but little was available. Most of the staff came from further afield and boarded in Buxton. “It’s a big logistical problem,” states Harvey. At peak, SES employed around 180 on-site operatives including subcontractors. “Buxton fortunately is a big tourist place so you can get people in, but as soon as the tourist season starts it becomes probably more difficult than anywhere else,” he adds. With guest houses preferring the travelling tourist to site operatives, some workers were left with journeys of up to 20 miles from their new accommodation.

The building is currently being commissioned, with staff from Sheffield due to arrive on 27 October. Once settled, those from Buxton will join them in the new facility and their temporary homes will be demolished. The hilltop site will then be landscaped and the picture postcard scene completed.