10th Mar 2006 Easy As You Go - But Precisely!
Sometimes We Can Be Very Delicate
Not everything we do at Chiltern Thrust Bore is as heavy weight and “in your face” as it always looks.
When Buckinghams of Milton Keynes commissioned us to do some work on the canal (right next to the railway) in Lichfield, British Waterways’ demands that we do everything to preserve the integrity of the canal banks meant we had to get our precision thinking to work.
There are few, if any, jobs that we’ve done in the past where we haven’t drilled to a depth of at least one metre - but in this instance we were unable to go deeper than 500mm under the canal bed.
With a fall of 1:150 and working in sandstone ground with rock equipment the flexibility and adaptability of our D80 40 ton machine was in for some severe testing.
To lay the 600mm sleeve that had to take the 450mm steel drainage pipe required us to dam the canal for a length of 5 metres on either side of the shot.
But if that’s what the environmental demands dictate of a job like this then that’s what we do.
So much more of our (and all construction) work now puts the environmental issues at the top of the priority list that we’ve almost become more expert than David Bellamy!