Water & Wastewater Treatment Magazine
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20 | OCTOBER 2019 | WWT | www.wwtonline.co.uk The Knowledge Health & safety been two instances of people being struck by smaller diam- eter pipes. The team spoke to the seven partner organisations in the @One Alliance to ask how they had gone about resolv- ing the issue but found that, although they were aware that there was a potential danger, no one had developed a solution. They expanded their search to the gas industry in search of an answer but received the same response. As such, they set about finding the solution them- selves and, a•er holding work- shops and receiving significant input from the workforce, they developed a multi-faceted initiative. A central element involved working with a supplier in Manchester named UIS – Utility Innovations Solutions – on a pipe handler. UIS had already worked alongside a company in Australia to scale down a pipe pusher and use it to grip the pipe and manipu- late it into position to allow the teams to make a connec- tion, and the @One Alliance saw an opportunity to go down the same route. "We worked with UIS and made some requests so that it would meet our standards," Justice says. "The first proto- type we saw didn't have check valves on so if the machine stopped it didn't necessar- ily hold in place. They made some modifications and we ran a number of trials with our frontline teams." A•er three trials, UIS had developed a suitable solution, and the use of the adapted pipe handler has now become mandatory. In addition, concerns were raised about the risk posed by the back end of pipes coming off the pipe coil trailers. "The frontline team recognised that the trailers we used weren't brilliant and there was an issue around restraining the coiled pipe as it's dispensed from the trailer," he adds. An additional trial was held to review the trailers, which included identifying the risks associated with loading on as well as the removal process. UIS and PSS Hire, which sup- plies the trailers, then agreed to work together to re-design the trailer so that the stored energy in the coiled pipe could be safely restrained as the end of the pipe is released. A further measure requires project designers to explore whether PE pipe is necessary in the first place. "Where we do use coiled pipe, we have a stand- ing methodology to use a combination of the pipe coil trailer and the pipe handler to mechanically manipulate any connections and pipework we need to do," he says. "Because that process is slightly more in-depth than the traditional approach, we do think about alternative products and pipe types. Sometimes coiled pipe is the right thing to use, but at other times it was just the default." There have been no further incidents since the methodol- ogy was developed, and the learning has been shared not just among Anglian Water and its partners but across the industry more widely. "When we started the investigation into the incident, there was a lot of anecdotal knowledge that these larger diameter coil pipes were dif- ficult to work with and the stored energy was an issue but nobody had really taken a step back and innovated," Justice says. "What was really good about the whole process we went through is that we took the opportunity to learn and change the way we work and really embraced the whole team. The frontline teams really understood the problem and a lot of them had ideas about how to work more safely. I think that before we'd just lost the need to listen to the frontline teams somewhere in the process. "It was only by bringing everyone's skill, knowledge and experience together that we were able to come up with an answer. I think if we tried to do it in isolation or as a safely-led initiative or even a construction initiative, we'd have missed something." Anglian Water's @One Alliance won the Health & Safety Initiative of the Year prize at the 2019 Water Industry Awards for its work on pipe coils The working group produced a procedure covering the safe storage and handling and PE pipe coils. It covers: • Design and decision making; eliminating the use of coiled pipe as far as is reasonably practicable • Correctly storing coiled PE pipe • Loading and unloading coiled pipe on trailers; mandating the use of PSS and UIS trailers • Controlling the coiled pipe during jointing and re-rounding; mandating the use of hydraulic pipe handling attachments