The presentation ended with an overview of TRAD’s key achievements throughout the past year, our success in securing many large Contracts in 2016 thus ensuring continual work for our workforce and Staff, avoiding any seasonal downturn and the Board of Directors commitment to recognising and rewarding safety and quality in the workplace.
Recognising Achievement
An important part of the seminar was to recognise our people’s achievements, with a special award for exemplary efforts in Health & Safety going to various Scaffolders across the three Operational Divisions headed by Divisional Directors, Chris Smith, Peter McShane and Tony Mileham.
Chris, Peter, and Tony presented the prizes and awards, including those for “Divisional Scaffolder of the Year” and “Best Improved Scaffolder of the year”, for those who best exemplified and implemented our 5 Key Safe Behaviours (Excellent Segregation, Safe System of Work, PPE, Housekeeping and Quality).
Winners were as follows:
Chris Smith’s Division:
Dean Lomiglio – Divisional Scaffolder of the Year
Luke Faik – Best Improved Scaffolder of the Year
Peter McShane’s Division
Karl Clinton – Divisional Scaffolder of the Year
Corey Belgrove – Best Improved Scaffolder of the Year
Tony Mileham’s Division
David Yates – Divisional Scaffolder of the Year
Oliver Wheatley – Best Improved Scaffolder of the Year
The final award presented was for Safe Employee of the Year – the criteria of which was based on our Clients’ recognition of our Scaffolders’ exemplary behaviour and their excellent control of our five Key Safe Behaviours on site.
This year’s winner was John Gardner – for leading the Scaffolding team on the highly prestigious “One Tower Bridge” Project for Berkeley Homes and John was also commended for being an exemplary colleague and running this high profile Project to a very high standard.
The afternoon finished with a Q&A session and opportunity for informal discussions with the Directors over refreshments in the function area. The Annual Seminar was once again considered a great success, by both the Staff and our Scaffolding workforce and the Company looks forward to a another mutually successful financial year and a continuation of this event in September 2016.
DES MOORE – TRAD GROUP MANAGING DIRECTOR commented:
Following our recent organisational re-structure and Neil’s well-deserved appointment to the MD position of Trad Co. Neil, his Divisional Directors and Contracts Staff have continued to recognise that it is absolutely essential that we engage with our whole workforce on all matters, which in my view remains at the heart of TRAD Co’s resilience and continued growth over the past 45 years. U.K. Edition
When a power plant goes offline it stops producing electricity and is a huge financial burden to the power company. To give you an idea of the cost of a power plant shutting down, consider that an average coal fired power plant can produce 600 megawatts per hour, or 600,000 kilowatt-hours. At £0.11 per kwh, this equates to a £66,000 loss in revenue per hour, or about £1.6 million per day.
The complexity of building scaffolding to service a power plant presents unique challenges to a scaffolding company. Even an average-sized boiler requires a massive amount of scaffolding and, to make matters worse, power plants are often located at remote locations that can take days to ship materials to. If a project is delayed for 8 hours because of a few missing parts, the owner is at risk of losing £528,000. A “close enough” bill of materials can put you out of business.
THE SCAFFOLDING STRUCTURE
By far the largest scaffold that needs to be built within a power plant is within the structure called the boiler. The boiler is where coal is ignited to produce superheated steam, which is in turn pushed out to the turbines to produce the electricity. Although boilers can be small, most of the boilers in power-generation are very large, requiring hundreds of people in varying shifts to build the scaffolding.
Boilers consists of four primary areas and shapes that every scaffolder needs to be aware of: the base, the main birdcage structure, the bullnose, and the superheater. Following will illustrate each area of the boiler scaffolding with automatically-generated models from Avontus’ Scaffold Designer software.
THE BASE
The base of every boiler is one of a few different shapes, often a V-bottom or a flat bottom that is sloped. Below the base is an ash hopper that collects the remains of the spent coal.
V-bottom boilers oftentimes have a set of beams extending across the opening with high-strength specialised ladders attached to the ends. Both the beams and the ladders are attached to u-heads and brackets and serve as the foundation for the main structure.
