When Willmott Dixon donated materials to help rebuild a row of old aviaries at an Owl Sanctuary in Festival Park, Ebbw Vale, it was able to get up close and personal with some very fearsome creatures, including the owl, pictured right.
Surplus materials, including plywood and stainless steel meshing, were transferred from the contractor’s nearby regeneration of a former steelworks site at Ebbw Vale to create seven much bigger and brighter homes for birds of prey, including owls, hawks, falcons and buzzards.
We’re guessing from the tense smile that the Willmott Dixon worker photographed agreed to the photo before he saw the size of the bird he’d be handling.
…creating a new safety product?
When construction management student Perry Coppen suffered an injury after tripping over a cable on site, his response was to invent a product that would secure loose cables to walls.
Tidi-Cable is a PVC product with an adhesive foam backing that can be cut up on site into up to 20 separate strips. Each section sticks to walls along corridors or rooms and is used to loop around bundles of cables and raise them above the floor. A metre-long strip can lift up to 200 metres of 1.5mm temporary cable from the floor without having to screw anything into a wall.
After securing a patent and developing the product while at Loughborough University, Coppen has now secured his first order for 500 units ahead of an official launch later this month.
“When I had the accident I knew straight away what could have prevented it, but the product didn’t exist,” said Coppen. ”A third of all construction accidents are caused by trips and falls, so I’m hoping it will have a major impact.”
…going back into the Stone Age?
London-based refurbishment specialist ME Construction is used to dealing with old buildings, but it recently had to develop a modern method statement for a project first undertaken in pre-history. It was asked to relocate a rare sarsen stone from a farm in Wiltshire to the University College London’s Institute of Archaeology, where it would commemorate 75 years as a leading global archaeology institution.
The sandstone monolith, similar to those used to construct Stonehenge, was donated by a farmer in the Avebury area, near Marlborough, and had to be removed, transported and then carefully installed onto a specially-prepared foundation. Not a “mammoth” task, but not one to entrust to Barney Rubble either.
…how London’s lights turned blue to celebrate the arrival of Prince George?
Westminster City Council flicked the switch to create a blue lighting scheme for Waterloo Bridge and the Golden Jubilee footbridge just 15 minutes after the news was announced.
It was thanks to civils firm FM Conway, which had worked with Westminster before the Olympics to install comprehensive lighting systems to its bridges as part of Project Dazzle, which provided dramatic lighting for the bridges throughout the Games. At the time it built in provision for the lights to be changed, and set up a wi-fi system that would allow different colours to be used on different occasions.
