How Active Training Team Kept 25,000 Tideway Workers Safe

Dermot Kerrigan, Director and Co-founder at Active Training Team, joins to discuss how the immersive EPIC safety center helped London's £5 billion Thames Tideway tunnel finish with zero fatalities and zero life-changing injuries. Plus similar centers built for Ørsted's Hornsea projects and SSE, and the mobile program his US team runs for wind and solar sites.

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Episode Transcript Uptime Spotlight: Dermot Kerrigan, Director and Co-founder, Active Training Team

Allen Hall: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Dermot Kerrigan: Thanks very much for having me back, Allen.

Allen Hall: Well, I brought you back because I want to talk about the major construction project in London that just wrapped up, which you were intimately involved with in terms of safety training through Active Training Team. That's the Thames Tideway project, a massive sewer project in London that started around 2016 and finished about a year ago, when I saw King Charles open and christen the new Tideway. And it's in operation today. Do you want to provide some background on what that project was and why it was even started?

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah, sure. We are a city now of around 9 million people, I believe. The sewage system that we have here was designed, I believe, for 2 million people back in Victorian times. And what was happening? Whenever we had a big storm, 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, health and environmental repercussions and risks.

So it was decided that they needed to stop this by building a huge tunnel along the River Thames for 25 kilometers. Whenever this happened, rather than being poured into the Thames, it would go into this tunnel, be run downstream to the east of London, be treated, and then go back into the system.

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 that was an 11-year period. It employed 25,000 people over that period from various contractor companies, main works contractors and subcontractors who were tasked with building this thing.

It went through a number of phases, from groundwork, literally digging holes, before they dug the big hole, which was the tunneling. There was pre-tunneling before that, and then, having done the tunnel, they actually built this thing and all the huge access shafts along the length of the river. The deepest point of the tunnel is 60 meters. It's a hell of a thing. You could drive two London double-decker buses through it at its widest point.

Of course, after the tunneling phase, there was commissioning, building parkland along the length of the Thames, and landscaping, before they actually said this thing is open. That was in March of this year, and apparently 21 million tonnes of sewage have been captured by it so far. So it does seem to be doing the trick.

Allen Hall: It's a massive project, and it's such a complicated project. As an engineer, I get really interested in the details of how that was going to work, because you're right, it's a 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 that you're working with water, with the Thames, and you're working with sewage, which is obviously dirty and full of contaminants. That puts a lot of risk on employees, contractors, construction workers, everybody inv