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. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! 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 companies, main works contractors and subcontractors who were tasked with building this thing. It went through a number of phases, from groundwork, literally digging holes, before they dug the big hole, which was the tunneling. There was pre-tunneling before that, and then, having done the tunnel, they actually built this thing and all the huge access shafts along the length of the river. The deepest point of the tunnel is 60 meters. It's a hell of a thing. You could drive two London double-decker buses through it at its widest point. Of course, after the tunneling phase, there was commissioning, building parkland along the length of the Thames, and landscaping, before they actually said this thing is open. That was in March of this year, and apparently 21 million tonnes of sewage have been captured by it so far. So it does seem to be doing the trick. Allen Hall: It's a massive project, and it's such a complicated project. As an engineer, I get really interested in the details of how that was going to work, because you're right, it's a Victorian-era sewer system, a massive sewer system that was built way larger than the recent tunnel, of course. But the complexity of tying a new sewer system into a roughly 150-year-old sewer system is complicated. Add the factor that you're working with water, with the Thames, and you're working with sewage, which is obviously dirty and full of contaminants. That puts a lot of risk on employees, contractors, construction workers, everybody involved in this process. So conceptually, we're going to dig a tunnel and put a couple of shafts in. I think they put about 30-odd shafts along the riverbanks to capture the effluent. But the complexity of it is crazy, to the point that, at least in my head, there was almost no chance that someone wasn't going to be seriously hurt or killed during that 10- or 11-year period. Drowning is a real possibility. Tunnel collapse is a possibility. Shafts collapsing is a possibility. You're dealing with cranes and heavy objects moving around, and steel and infrastructure. Someone's going to get seriously injured during this period. And the way construction projects work at this scale is that they have estimates, based on previous history in the UK, of how many people are going to be injured and how many people are going to be killed during the project. Two or three people were expected to be killed, and over 100 seriously injured, with life-altering injuries. That's alarming. But that explains why they called in Active Training Team and a number of others to come in and change the safety narrative. And that's where you come in, because I think the results have been astounding. First, I want you to describe what you did. What did you put in place, and why was it different at the time from other safety programs? Dermot Kerrigan: Well, I think safety up until 2015 on these big infrastructure projects was very much about systems and processes. What people weren't really taking notice of is the whole battle for hearts and minds. What this project was determined to avoid was the bare minimum that they could expect. And they were told, you're absolutely right, that the best you can hope for on a big 5 billion pound project like this over a 10- or 11-year period is to kill at least two people, with 150 serious, life-changing injuries and thousands of lost time injuries. They didn't want that. They were determined that wasn't going to happen. So they had to get a bit left field. They started looking around at other projects that had done something maybe a little bit out there, and they came across us, Active Training Team. We'd done some work with another big infrastructure project called Crossrail, which is an east-west rail line that opened some time ago, called the Elizabeth Line, that runs through London. We did this thing for them called the Target Zero Roadshow, which the contractors had to go through. It was a blend of film, live drama and facilitated discussion, where we showed an incident, the antecedents that led to it, and the consequences for all involved. It was a mobile thing. We took it from site to site, but it was pretty out there in terms of this blend of different media. So the people who ran Tideway at the time approached us and said, look, if we gave you carte blanche to do whatever you wanted, if we asked you to build this mad induction center that everybody has to go through to give them a life-changing experience before they start work on this project, to make them think, I need to do the right thing when it comes to safety, what would you do? We had this idea based on immersive theater, which is a big thing here in the UK, where you take a space, divide it into various sets, and take people on a multimedia journey where they see, in real time, if you like, the events that led up to a serious incident, the incident itself, and what happens after that. But then you give them some safety leadership tools and parachute them back into that scenario to practice those tools in real time. It's all to do with challenging and accepting challenge, and creating a culture of psychological safety where people feel absolutely able, where it's a no-brainer, to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, I'm not happy with that. Sorry, let's reconsider. Let's plan again. And to our incredible surprise, they went for it. They spent over 1 million pounds on building this state-of-the-art facility in central London. Everybody who was going to work on that project, whether they were a contractor with a spade in their hand, a receptionist in an office, somebody in the back office, or leaders, everybody who was going to set foot on either a site or an office on the Tideway project, had to go through this one-day experience first. The idea was that everybody bought into the ethos that operational safety isn't just the responsibility of operational people. All of us have a part to play to ensure that the guys doing the hands-on work go home in one piece. Allen Hall: I think that's a remarkable difference from a lot of the training programs we have seen in the renewable energy sector. A lot of times, the safety discussions are focused on the ground-level people, the people actually doing the heavy lifts, moving the trucks around, and doing that work. But the reality is that decisions are made throughout the organization which have an impact on safety. Management has an impact on safety. Procurement has an impact on safety. Just by choosing a less expensive safety device, you could increase the safety risk. And unless we have thought through those processes, we're still going to have big-time problems with accident rates. I think this is where Active Training Team really changed the narrative a good bit. But I think you don't sell the in-person aspect of this enough. I've taken the course two times now, and both times it was so emotionally impactful that it's hard to forget. There's a difference between watching a video, or going to a movie with your wife or somebody, where there's an emotion to watching the movie and being engrossed in it for an hour or so, or even going to a stage play, which is even more person to person, with a real-life person enacting the script, versus putting yourself in the situation. That's the immersive part of the EPIC center and Active Training Team's process. When you put yourself in that role, it becomes personal. And obviously, you're an actor,...