St Jude storm causes construction chaos
Scaffolding and cranes across south-east England were hit by winds of up to 99mph yesterday (29 October) when a storm hit.
The storm, dubbed St Jude, caused damage to the Cabinet Office in Whitehall when a crane collapsed (image courtesy of Twitter @DavidJonesMP).
The jib of the luffing crane buckled onto the roof of the Cabinet Office at approximately 6.50 on Monday morning, following which deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg cancelled a scheduled press conference.
He tweeted: “Today’s press conference has been moved to a day when there isn’t a crane on the roof and journalists travelling on the train are able to join us.”
SHP understands that the crane was due to be dismantled over the weekend, but the job was cancelled due to bad weather warnings. A mobile crane has now been brought in to remove the collapsed structure.
The London Fire Brigade said that between 0600 and 0900 on Monday morning, it received 412 emergency calls, leading to fire engines and other fire brigade vehicles being sent to 310 incidents across the capital.
A spokesperson said: “We are attending a number of wind-related incidents — mostly trees and scaffolding in precarious positions.”
In the rest of the capital, scaffolding and hoarding collapsed in Mayfair, a luffing crane in Old Kent Road collapsed through a roof, and in east London, a road was blocked when 100 metres of two-storey scaffolding blew down.
Scaffold collapse in East London. Image courtesy of Twitter @MarkyBoyLondon.
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St Jude storm causes construction chaos
Scaffolding and cranes across south-east England were hit by winds of up to 99mph yesterday (29 October) when a storm hit.
Safety & Health Practitioner
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Nice to see the effort made at reducing the wind load by removing the sheeting and tieing off of the boards?
We see this all too often, how was this permissable under a Scaffold Licence scenario? where was the design element considered here? Its no good pointing fingers at the scaffolder alone? Someone allowed it to be erected and made no effort what so ever at risk mitigation. CDM failed in east london this time.
No doubt they were unaware of the shining Olympic example.
Hopefully Brad is not a Construction Advisor?
Any sheeted struture needs to be designed. (This includes debris netting, let alone sheeting). Badly erected, accepted and inspected (presumably) by all concerned.
Ample warning was given to enable interim effort at protection against such wind impact.
PPP all round. Lucky no one was killed.
L. Whitehouse I commend your sentiments.
Its amazing how often I saw similar failure as an HSE Inspector. I once put a PN on a complete hotel refurb in Edingburgh for similar failure. Took them 2 weeks to rectify the scaffold in accordance with an approved TW design.
They were not happy in the least.
Nor was I with the Micky Mouse effort they had erected.
The hoist had pulled half of the ties out completely. And the cantilever was punchoned from the canteen roof. 200+ ops on site.
I think somebody is being harsh – these were after all 100mph winds. Good H&S is about foreseeable and at the time of construction this probably was not
I disagree with Brad. Any structural failure due to winds is forseeable. In this case the old BS4 code for London was a gust of 38 m/s or 85 mph. Adding on a safety factor takes the requirement to over 100 mph even for a temporary structure, let alone one which appears to have had plastic sheet 100% cover. Current Eurocode applied correctly would match this. Even then there was sufficient warning to review and take down the sheeting etc., and the scaffold should then have stood.
In response to Brad’s comment, this storm was predicted a week before it hit. There are no excuses for leaving the sheeting on the scaffold.