Awards for the Rail Team at Terminal 5
The 250 strong Balfour Beatty Rail Project and Balfour Kilpatrick joint venture team, responsible for the fitting out of the Heathrow Express and Piccadilly line extensions to Heathrow Terminal 5 for BAA, were awarded coveted safety and environment accolades recognising their efforts on site.
As one of the largest construction projects in Europe the work at Terminal 5 is extremely complex with no room for error. The Balfour Beatty element covers trackwork, traction power and mechanical and electrical works for the railway links, plus construction and fit out of the rail station passenger interchange and the track transit system and associated stations, as well as fixed links and ancillary buildings.
All the suppliers have worked to a "groundbreaking" agreement which encouraged working in an integrated project teams with a common culture which included the Incident and Injury-Free (IIF) programme and common environmental goals.
Project Director Mike Millar explained that the team's safety efforts went beyond merely keeping the number of accidents down, though that is obviously important. "The judges were also very impressed with the team's attitudes and understanding of safety issues" said Mike.
Since November 2004 the team has clocked-up over 1.75 million man-hours with four reportable accidents in that period. As work on this contract draws to a close the 12-month AFR (accident frequency rate) stands at 0.1, this compares well with the AFR for the whole T5 project of 0.20 which is considered one of the best in the industry.
Within the Balfour Beatty Group this project was one of the first to pro-actively manage minor accident data (MAFR) and over the duration of the contract this has shown significant year-on-year reductions."
In tackling environmental issues one initiative involved creating a crack team of seven site environment representatives who were able to react to issues as they arose. Judges were particularly impressed by the team's record of reporting and managing incidents, but it was a scheme to build a bund around a concrete pump where alkaline water wash-out has been an issue, containing it once and for all that secured the win.
Terminal 5 is due to open in the summer of 2008, but the Balfour Beatty team complete their work in the summer of 2007 when they will be moving to other projects where they will be applying their winning ways.
T5 Construction Facts
- Programme costs of around £4.3 billion
- Consists of 16 projects and over 100 sub-projects
- 41 first tier suppliers
- 8,000 people working on site at peak period
- 60,000 people will have worked at T5 at some point
- 1,250 people joined T5 in a single month
- Total effort to design and construct T5 is estimated at 37 million manhours
- When fully open, T5 will deliver 60 aircraft stands to Heathrow - about a quarter will cater for the new Airbus A380
- The T5 site covers 260ha - the same size as London's Hyde Park
- The main terminal building could accommodate around 50 football pitches - 10 on each of its five floors