Balfour Beatty Vinci JV have been awarded the M4 (junctions 3-12) smart motorway upgrade in one of Europe’s largest highways construction endeavours. The project has up to 110 banksmen, every day, over the 32-mile site who need to be protected from worksite incursions. In conjunction with ‘Raising the Bar 27’, risk assessments highlight the need for physical barrier’s at multiple points along the motorway to protect the workforce and cut incursions onto the worksite. The challenge was to do this while reducing budget costs.
Following the initial consultation, it was established that the solution needed to be unmanned, physical, barrier’s that would prevent public incursions entering from the live lane. The barrier required had to be quick to deploy, compact and portable, power free and able cover a range of road widths.
Solar Gates UK solved Balfour Beatty’s problem with INSTABOOM. It is a ‘game changer’ in highway safety allowing the monotonous and dangerous job of manning a barrier-guard to be done automatically. Reducing the number of operatives having to stand in the line of moving traffic to protect work crews further down the lane by providing a physical remote barrier, stopping unauthorised vehicles entering an active construction area. INSTABOOM has dramatically reduced the sites’ PVM budget and re-deploying staff to more productive work.
“Introducing INSTABOOM solar barriers across our contracts, has significantly improved safety by removing a person with a static barrier and having INSTABOOM controlled by the machine operators, ensuring peoples’ safety across our sites” explains Mike Omond, Plant Specialist, Balfour Beatty.
“We have over 70 INSTABOOM barriers on the M4 contract alone, over the next 2 years, the barriers will give us savings in the region of £2m from our manned guarding budget. The success of INSTABOOM on the M4 has seen us roll them out on multiple highways projects across the UK. We are proudly managing safety by introducing innovation and products that make a difference now and drive our Balfour Beatty Zero Harm policy.” Concludes Omond.