HEALTH AND SAFETY RISKS IN tunnelling are well recognised and well documented. From the siting of temporary works to creating the first shaft, lowering everything the project requires from mammoth TBMs to operatives, electrical installations, operating TBMs and excavators, to applying sprayed concrete linings, the list of risks is long and complex.
Health and safety is also constantly evolving as technological developments may reduce some existing risks but also introduce new considerations. But it is more than just practical measures; it is also about culture and psychology and that was something recognised early on at Crossrail.
Now renamed the Elizabeth Line, Crossrail is the almost completed 100km-long high-capacity railway from Reading in the West, crossing London to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east. From the tunnelling to the current operational testing, the safety approach throughout has been led by the Safety and Health Leadership Team (SHELT). The group, which recently held its 100th meeting, comprises directors from Crossrail and Tier 1 contractors. They meet monthly to discuss health and safety performance and initiatives and agree the strategic direction of the health and safety improvement programme. Its membership has changed as the project has progressed but the message has remained constant. “It brings together all of our contractors and the client into a forum where we work together,” says Andy Weber, Crossrail’s head of delivery for RfL stations. “It’s about the best piece of collaboration you’ll ever see. In many respects, it’s what’s enabled us to perform as well as we have, as a very diverse and geographically-spread programme.”
SHELT’s focus may be safety but it has also enabled delivery.
“You can’t separate the two,” says Weber. “If you have an accident your delivery is impacted but if you collaborate on safety, you can aid delivery too.”
Initially, one of the biggest challenges in terms of health and safety, says Crossrail’s Martin Gamble, who was construction manager at Farringdon station for eight years, was changing the traditional culture of tunnelling.
“In the past it was very much based on bonuses and production. If you look back 100 years they said you’d kill a person for every mile of tunnel. We didn’t want to be anywhere near that culture,” he explains.
From the outset, the overarching mission statement has been ‘Target Zero’. High-risk activities were identified and reviewed as the project progressed and the works changed but Target Zero has been consistent. This recognises that:
¦ Everyone has the right to go home unharmed every day
¦ All harm is preventable and
¦ Everyone must work together to achieve that.
Target Zero is underpinned by Crossrail’s five Golden Rules:
¦ Respect the basics
¦ Assess the risks
¦ Check the site
¦ Follow the site requirements and
¦ Support each other.
The latter, says Weber, is absolutely key to good health-and-safety performance, and it is where the psychology comes in. “It’s a lot about human relationships. There’s only so far that the rules will take you,” he says.
An important part of this was empowering supervisors through the Frontline Leadership Programme (FLP), says Crossrail’s principal construction manager, Phil Jones. Through the FLP, supervisors at all levels have been mentored in all aspects of the project, including health and safety. Jones says empowering supervisors to stop work if they deem it risky has been fundamental to delivering the safety aspects of the project. This, however, required a shift in culture and focus, and providing training for supervisors who perhaps were not equipped with the necessary leadership skills.
Alan Swann was responsible for health and safety for the BBMV joint venture on C510 – the construction of tunnels at Liverpool Street and Whitechapel, and C512 – construction of a new station at Whitechapel. He says the culture of safety success is to get people to understand that others care about them, which builds trust.
“If you put some feelings into it, make it personal, people will take out hazards before they exist, so they’re doing immediate corrective actions,” says Swann.
“We consulted a lot of people who weren’t normally consulted – the drivers, the pushers, the shovers – and it was alien to them when we put people first because it was normally production first.”
To reinforce this, the miners’ bonuses, which are traditionally paid on progress, were also linked to safety. “It was very much about making sure everyone realised that even if there was the slightest accident or lack of adherence to PPE requirements, it would hit them in the pocket,” says Gamble. However it took some time before the supervisors were to gain full confidence in the new culture.
“When we started, we had a big wrestling match making sure they realised we really meant what we were saying, that they really did have the empowerment to stop work if they thought it was unsafe,” says Gamble.
Encouraging people to buy into a culture change can be challenging but Crossrail ensured the workforce’s efforts were acknowledged. “One of the best ways to build morale is if you have a good safety record, and if you can celebrate it there’s nothing better,” says Swann.
The Target Zero ethos was embedded further with a biannual Stepping-Up Week where each site across the project held activities to promote health and safety. As the workforce took greater ownership of safety, they also became more interested and innovative. On C510, one group developed technology to monitor fatigue; at Farringdon the workforce had input into redesigning the tremie key to reduce its 70kg weight. “The workforce drove innovation and change, and that helped to achieve the productivity and safety ethos,” says Swann.
Now in the operational testing phase, Crossrail continues to have health and safety incidents, but Weber says that needs to be put into context. “External critics of Crossrail will continue to say we’re having a lot of incidents; I would say we have a lot of near misses due to creating a reporting culture where we encourage the team to highlight health and safety incidents. The numbers of people getting injured are low and the injuries are minor, although still too high when our objective is Target Zero.”
Crossrail’s approach to health and safety is built on the experience of previous large UK tunnelling projects such as the Jubilee Line Extension, Heathrow Express and Heathrow’s Terminal 5; the lessons learnt on Crossrail will be transferred to subsequent projects, such as Tideway and HS2.
“It’s been done in steps,” explains Gamble. “I had worked on the Jubilee Line Extension in the 1990s. That was a leap in safety culture but Crossrail has definitely advanced it to the next level. It has recognised the importance of frontline leadership and the impact that people at the sharp end can really make to the safety culture.”
Weber agrees that the ethos now is much more preventative and proactive and about understanding how people think, rather than just following rules. There is also no shortage of ingenuity and creativity around what can be done to understand better and improve safety.
“We’ve found we have more incidents at certain times so that enables us to work on solutions. We have more incidents on Tuesday mornings so we take people out at that time and give them a safety briefing,” says Weber.
With this knowledge, various systems could be established at the start of new projects to collate this information. “That’s before you get all the technical improvements, the removal of people from the workface by either robotics or preassembly and prefabrication, which as an industry we’re looking at,” says Weber.
“Another aspect is continuing to better understand how we can get a diverse group of people to be part of the health and safety drive. It is not that people don’t believe in Target Zero, it is whether they believe they have the authority or the right to stand up.”
This is where he believes experts in other fields, such as psychology, could be brought in to help.
Crossrail’s Learning Legacy website (learninglegacy.crossrail.co.uk) holds a huge library of information on lessons learned throughout the project but those who worked on Crossrail point out the shift in health and safety culture is also a notable legacy.
“The development of safety culture is phenomenal,” says Jones. “Client education and involvement has grown and they’ve brought the Tier 1 contractors on that journey as well.
“The collaborative working here is one of the successes and the lessons learnt from that are significant. The same culture can be transferred from one programme to another, as long as we make it happen. That’s our challenge as leaders: we have to make sure that the legacy is implemented on other projects.”
Weber agrees. “We believe we are helping to set people up for a better future,” he says.
