Episode Eleven, How to build a Railway: Safe at Heart

How to Build a Railway is a twelve-part podcast series exploring the story behind the construction of the UK’s new high speed rail line. With any project, health and safety plays an important role. From working at height to operating heavy machinery, there is always a risk towards the health and wellbeing of workers, and possibly the public. How do workers identify and mitigate hazards? How do they make use of decades of progress in health and safety? And how do they build upon that knowledge to help improve industry best practice and beyond? This episode of How to build a railway, ‘Safe at Heart’, explores why nothing on this project is more important than the health, safety and wellbeing of everyone working on HS2. Featuring: Emma Head – HS2 Technical Services Delivery Director Fiona King – HS2 Head of Occupational Health and Wellbeing Dame Judith Hackitt – HS2 Non-Executive Director Ben Bryant – Align TBM Engineer Sasan Ghavami – BBV Deputy Project Director SL7 Emma outlines HS2’s Health and Safety Strategy along with how the organisation works with its supply chain to drive the performance of Health and Safety. Fiona dives into the importance of Occupational Health and viewing the long-term risks to individuals that may only become present 20+ years later. She also talks through “Health by Design”. An approach of identifying and mitigating risks to health and wellbeing before construction even starts. Dame Judith discusses the learning from other projects when it comes to health and safety along with having a project this scale to use as an opportunity to set new standards for the industry. Ben explains the use of robotics on TBM “Cecilia”, and how it benefits the workers’ health and safety by removing risks of working from height and exposure to materials in the ground being excavated. Sasan describes the Marston Box push and how actions taken not only benefited health and safety for the workforce, but also the local community.The post Episode Eleven, How to build a Railway: Safe at Heart first appeared on Engineering Matters.