How Active Training Team Kept 25,000 Tideway Workers Safe

Dermot Kerrigan, Director and Co-founder at Active Training Team, joins to discuss how the immersive EPIC safety center helped London's £5 billion Thames Tideway tunnel finish with zero fatalities and zero life-changing injuries. Plus similar centers built for Ørsted's Hornsea projects and SSE, and the mobile program his US team runs for wind and solar sites.

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Episode Transcript

Uptime Spotlight: Dermot Kerrigan, Director and Co-founder, Active Training Team

Allen Hall: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Dermot Kerrigan: Thanks very much for having me back, Allen.

Allen Hall: Well, I brought you back because I want to talk about the major construction project in London that just wrapped up, which you were intimately involved with in terms of safety training through Active Training Team. That's the Thames Tideway project, a massive sewer project in London that started around 2016 and finished about a year ago, when I saw King Charles open and christen the new Tideway. And it's in operation today. Do you want to provide some background on what that project was and why it was even started?

Dermot Kerrigan: Yeah, sure. We are a city now of around 9 million people, I believe. The sewage system that we have here was designed, I believe, for 2 million people back in Victorian times. And what was happening? Whenever we had a big storm, the sewers couldn't cope with all the water, so the excess poured into the River Thames, which runs through London, with huge, as you can imagine, health and environmental repercussions and risks.

So it was decided that they needed to stop this by building a huge tunnel along the River Thames for 25 kilometers. Whenever this happened, rather than being poured into the Thames, it would go into this tunnel, be run downstream to the east of London, be treated, and then go back into the system.

They decided to do this back in 2015, when the first spade hit the ground, and it just got commissioned. The final screws got tightened on it in March of this year, so that was an 11-year period. It employed 25,000 people over that period from various contractor compa