New fire response centre opens
A new fire response centre has been opened at Hinkley Point C (HPC) to provide round-the-clock safety support and is home to the HPC Fire and Rescue Service.
With specialist training facilities and an appliance bay to house the fire trucks and equipment, the station also gives the response team swift and easy access to the site.
Brent Briard, HPC Incident Response Lead, said: “This is an exciting step for all the emergency response teams at site, for Hinkley Health and the Fire and Rescue Services.”
A dedicated training area outside the fire station will allow the HPC response team to experience environments similar to those on site. In addition, Arco Total Access Training Services has donated a confined-space training unit and is also providing specialist rope access and confined-space training and more to the HPC Fire and Rescue team.
All four shifts have completed their tower crane training and are moving on to confined-space training. This will be vital as Balfour Beatty ramps up the tunnelling works.
Brent added: “A key feature of the building is the watch room, which will be manned 24/7 by team members. This new fire station is open 24/7 for fire safety advice for anyone on site and we also welcome our contractors to utilise the fire training facility in collaborative drills.”
Rapid progress on warehouse
One of the first permanent buildings away from the nuclear reactor itself, the Framatome Warehouse, is making rapid progress. Since the initial delivery of steel arrived on site, a local company, Haley Engineering, has been erecting and fabricating the steel frame on behalf of Bouygues UK.
With more than 570 pieces of steel having been installed to date, the progress is a significant accomplishment as it was one of the first permanent buildings to begin construction atHPC. Once completed, the warehouse will store components for the construction of the reactor buildings and, after the construction phase, it will be retained for storage.
New contract awarded
Japanese engineering experts Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) will be teaming up with world-leading Weir Engineering Services (WES) to design, manufacture, test and supply 34 pumps for the power station. MHI will design and manufacture the pumps, while WES will handle project management, motors procurement, pre-installation testing, and pump sets delivery.
Kier Bam teams complete handovers
HPC Tier 1 contractor Kier Bam is making good progress across site. The earthworks and roads and networks teams are close to finishing a platform to the east of the north office. There is now only 31,550m3 left to be excavated and the drainage works to the west, south and east of the Site are well underway.
In the deep dig, good progress has been made with works at the Unit 2 heat sink and nuclear island areas. The teams have also completed successful handovers to Balfour Beatty which allowed tunnelling to start, while Bylor now has access to even more platforms. Socea Denys has also had additional platforms handed over to them to continue the CRF pipe installation.
Taken from The Point April 2020