Safety in Design: Making Trenchless Projects Safer

Health and safety management is so important in the trenchless industry. With personnel utilising heavy equipment in various environments, the potential for things to go wrong can be high without effective health and safety management. It’s something we reflect on daily, but especially on days like today: World Day for Safety and Health at Work.

We’re all familiar with the more common and visible aspects of health and safety, such as risk assessment and wearing our PPE. But at Future-Proof Solutions, we’re firm believers that effective health and safety management on trenchless projects starts with design. This is because by incorporating Safety in Design into trenchless projects, many unnecessary hazards and risks can be reduced or eliminated entirely – making your site fundamentally safer.

But how can you incorporate Safety in Design into your next trenchless project? Some methods include the following:

Well designed site layouts

A well designed site layout is one of the most practical ways of maximising trenchless project safety. Safer site layouts can be achieved by incorporation of aspects such as the following:

Suitable rig loading configuration. By considering safety as a leading factor in your rig loading configuration (left-hand or right-hand), many OHS hazards can be avoided, such as:
- Lifting pipe over rigs
- Excessive excavator movement
- Unnecessary personnel movement

And so on.

Profile and alignment

Safety in Design can be incorporated into profile and alignments via methods such as:

Decreasing entry angle. This lowers the rig setup height, decreasing the need for riggers to navigate steep machinery near moving parts (which can be wet and slippery)
Decreasing exit angle. This in turn reduces breakover angle of pipe for pullback installation and can eliminate the major safety risks associated with high breakovers (e.g. crane operations, high pipe suspensions, etcetera).

Entry and exit angles must always be weighed between safety, environmental and methodology considerations, but with good design, you can reach a suitable and informed balance.

As you can see, Safety in Design maximises the most effective, more preferable controls on the hierarchy of control, such as elimination of risk and isolation of hazards. This means that in many aspects, the site itself is made innately safer. It also means there is less reliance on the less effective controls, such as administrative/behavioural controls and PPE.

We’re always thinking about how we can improve safety into our trenchless designs, and we have some exciting new products in the pipeline (pardon the pun) with safety in mind. Stay tuned for our next product launch: the Emergency Response Site Layout, which, as an optional add-on layer, sets out safety reference points and features in your site layout. They’re completed by our in-house health and safety guru, who has more than 10 years’ experience in drilling industries and HSEQ.

And of course, we wish all clients and friends of Future-Proof Solutions a happy and safe World Day for Safety and Health at Work.