How Active Training Team Kept 25,000 Tideway Workers Safe

Allen Hall (0:01)

The Thames Tideway Tunnel took 11 years and 25,000 workers to build London's new super sewer. Forecast said it would cost the lives of two to three workers and permanently injure up to 150

It finished with zero deaths and zero serious injuries. This week, we welcome back Dermot Kerrigan of Active Training Team, who explains how EPIC, their immersive safety training facility, changed behavior on the Thames project and how they're using the training system to protect offshore wind workers today.

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Allen Hall (0:48)

Dermot, welcome back to the podcast.

Dermot Kerrigan (0:50)

Thanks very much for having me back, Allen.

Allen Hall (0:52)

Well, I brought you back because I want to talk about the major construction project in London that just wrapped up that you were intimately involved with in terms of safety training and Dermot, of course, is with Active Training Team.

The Thames Tideway project, which is a massive sewer project that happened starting around 2016 in London and just finished about a year ago when I saw King Charles open and christen the new Tideway project. And it's in operation today. You want to provide some background into what that project was and why it was even started?

Dermot Kerrigan (1:30)

Yeah, sure.

So we are a city now of around nine million people, I believe. The sewer system that we have here was designed, I believe, for two million people back in Victorian times. And what was happening whenever we had a big storm here, the sewers couldn't cope with all the water. So the excess poured into the River Thames, which runs through London, with huge, as you can imagine, you know, health and environmental repercussions and risks. So it was decided that we needed to stop this, or they needed to stop this by building a huge tunnel, the length of the River Thames for 25 kilometers. So that whenever this happened, rather than being poured into the Thames, it went into this tunnel, it was then run downstream to the east of London, it would then be treated and go back into the system.

So they decided to do this back in 2015, when the first spade hit the ground. And it just got commissioned, the final screws got tightened on it in March of this year. So, you know, that was an 11-year period in between. Now, it employed 25,000 people over that period, from various contractor companies, main works contractors and subcontractors who were tasked with building this thing. And it went through a number of various phases, from, you know, ground work, literally digging holes, before they dug the big hole, which was tunnelling. But then there was pre-tunnelling before that, tunnelling, having done the tunnel, they actually built this thing and all the huge shafts, which had to go down the access shafts along the length of the river. The deepest point of the tunnel is 60 meters, so it's a hell of a thing. You can drive two London double-decker buses through this thing at its widest point. Now, of course, after the tunnelling phase, there was commissioning, building parkland, etc. along the length of Thames and landscaping, before they actually said that this thing is open.

That was in March of this year. Apparently, 21 million tons of sewage have been captured by it so far. So it does seem to be doing its trick.

Allen Hall (3:55)

It's a massive project, and it's such a complicated project. As an engineer, I get really interested into the details of how that was going to work. Because you're right, Victorian era sewer system, a massive sewer system that was built way larger than the recent tunnel, of course. But the complexity of tying a new sewer system into a roughly 150-year-old sewer system is complicated. Add the factor on, you're working near water with the Thames, and you're working with sewage, which is obviously dirty and full of contaminants, puts a lot of risk on employees, contractors, construction workers, everybody involved in this process. So although, conceptually, we're going to dig a tunnel, we're going to put a couple of shafts in, I think they put like 30-odd shafts along the river banks to capture the effluents.

The complexity of it is crazy to the point of, there is almost no chance that, at least in my head, that someone wasn't going to be seriously hurt during that 10, 11-year period or killed because drowning is a real possibility. Tunnel collapse is a possibility. These shafts collapsing is a possibility. You're dealing with cranes and heavy objects moving around and steel and infrastructure. Someone's going to get seriously injured during this period.