Network Rail Emergency Gives Focus to Team Building Event
30/07/2010
Just before our annual leave we received a call from one of our clients John Fairbairn who has a PPC permitted landfill site down at Lamberton on the east coast Scottish Border near Berwick upon Tweed.
The story was that the main east coast rail line had suffered a landslip on the coast side adjacent to the permitted site and Network Rail needed access to the site to install new drainage points and associated infrastructure to alleviate the landslip problem and get the trains running normally, a speed reduction had been imposed, through the affected area.
The matter was complicated since all of the engineering works and associated infrastructure needed to be placed within the PPC permitted site boundary.
From an SC Waste Management point of view the issues to be addressed were:
- The Partial surrender of the existing PPC permit
- Site investigation to determine no tipping had historically occurred in the area to be excluded from the new permit and to be surrendered
- A new PPC permit application with a new boundary excluding the area to be utilised permanently by Network Rail
A methodology was put forward to SEPA to facilitate determining whether the area of land subject to the partial permit surrender had been the subject of waste deposition or not. This involved the digging of a number of pits in a grid format over the land area to an agreed depth with profiles of the pits being photographed and depths measured. This was agreed by SEPA and Julie Crossett organised the exercise before heading out to the team building week in France.
While in France on holiday we put together the various components of the partial surrender and the new application as required by SEPA and we hope to have this submitted in week 2 of August.
Link to the Project Data sheet here