Crossrail is Europe’s biggest construction project. The new railway will stretch over 60 miles from Reading and Heathrow in the west, through central London to Abbey Wood and Shenfield in the east. Steve Hails reports on progress to date.
Crossrail is now at peak construction, employing more than 10,000 people across 40 sites in London. The programme recently hit the halfway mark with over 45 million working hours completed.
However, it is the project’s complexity that it just as daunting as its size. London is already a hugely congested city both above and below ground. In central London, where space is at a premium, worksites are small and confined. Tunnelling machines have to weave in and out of the assets already below ground, often passing within centimetres of existing tunnels. No two of the 40 worksites dotted across London are the same — each has its own work programme and its own risks.
Moreover, the project never stands still as its profile is constantly changing. Up until now the focus has been on tunnelling and underground construction as we create the physical space below ground for the new railway. This is now beginning to shift to fitting out the tunnels and stations and delivering an operating railway that will eventually carry more than 200 million passengers every year.
The health and safety challenges of dealing with such a huge and technically complex project are many and varied. Crossrail’s main focus has been to embed health and safety culture into every aspect of the project. Its three ‘target zero’ principles are intended to guide everyone’s behaviour at all times, regardless of whether they are working in head office or 30 metres underground. These state that everyone has the right to go home unharmed every day; that all harm is preventable; and that everyone needs to work together to achieve this.
A vital part of our health and safety programme is to ensure that all work is planned for clearly and effectively. Before any work can take place, it is reviewed by appropriate, competent individuals, approved in advance and can start only when all identified control measures are in place.
Equally, our strict and comprehensive reporting process is key to identifying emerging issues and trends. Learning points are shared across the project through internal bulletins and regular project-wide conference calls.
Contractors are not measured just on their historic performance. We also score them on the measures that they put in place to prevent accidents from occurring in the first place. The Health and Safety Performance Index (HSPI) combines a series of these leading indicators that evaluate contractors on their performance and allows us to confirm compliance or identify any emerging areas of concern.
Crossrail is performing well and we’re proud of the health and safety culture that we have been able to instil in the project. With some of the largest contractors in Europe working on the project, Crossrail is in a unique position to engage the workforce and to leave a lasting legacy for years to come.
In early 2013, Crossrail’s directors decided that to keep on improving we needed to gauge the views of people working on the project. A health and safety climate survey was produced and distributed and the workforce response was phenomenal. In total we had over 5,300 responses, almost two thirds of the workforce at the time.
While overall the results were very positive, the survey identified a series of areas that needed to be improved upon. These included increasing awareness around hazard identification and improved communication and reporting mechanisms. A series of reports were then produced — a Crossrail-wide report and reports for each worksite — that clearly identified what we were doing well and what needed to be done better.
To drive through the action plan, we created ‘stepping up’ week — a focal point for the whole programme, something that would capture the imagination and that people could get properly involved in. The idea was to introduce a whole week dedicated to raising the profile of health and safety across the programme and to allow each part of the project to tackle the specific problems that arose from the survey.
This was really something out of the ordinary — a whole week out of the year to devote, in its entirety, to dealing with health and safety. Each site came up with its own tailored schedule that would allow it to deal with the issues that came out of the survey.
There were a huge number of activities aimed at everyone working on the project regardless of whether they work behind a desk or out on-site.
To provide just a few examples, renowned health and safety motivational speaker Ken Woodward OBE spoke to the team at Farringdon; staff at Custom House did a ‘stretch and flex’ routine to limber up before they started work; a number of ‘mock rescues’ took place as part of building closer-working relationships with the emergency services; senior directors rolled up their sleeves and swapped places with workers to get better experience of some of the risks on-site; staff who were not familiar with plant had the chance to get behind the wheel of bulldozers and dumper trucks to get a better idea of the vehicles’ blind spots.
The first day of the stepping up week also coincided with Workers’ Memorial Day on the 28th April. Every site on Crossrail held a one-minute silence for everyone who has died, suffered ill health or injury at workplaces across the world.
For many of us, our thoughts turned to the family and friends of Rene Tkacik, who tragically died in March this year when a section of sprayed concrete fell from a tunnel ceiling. It was the first fatality on a Crossrail site. Rene’s death deeply affected me and others working on the project and served as a harsh reminder to all of us of the need to keep on driving up standards of safety on-site.
We have now held two ‘stepping up’ weeks and we’re pleased with the impact that they have had.
For example, in the months following the week, there was a 38 per cent increase in reporting on-site and 90 per cent of Crossrail worksites have implemented more regular initiatives to improve health and safety.
The commitment now is to hold two stepping up weeks a year, the next of which will be in mid-October this year. The events are proving to be a vital component of our health and safety programme and an approach that I would fully recommend to other construction projects seeking to engage with their workforce and drive up safety standards.
Steve Hails is health and safety director at Crossrail
