Our Asphalt business showed last week how it can react at short notice to customers’ needs in an emergency. On Friday 4th August the Rugby Planning Team was contacted by Brett Coupland, Operations Manager, Eurovia National Surfacing, of a developing situation on the M5 Motorway near Weston-Super-Mare where an incident involving two lorries had closed two lanes of the northbound carriageway. Brett and his surfacing crew had to get the road re-opened as soon as possible as it was peak holiday season.
Great teamwork between Rugby Planning, Wickwar Asphalt Plant and the Logistics Team focused on making materials available later that day. A “small repair” soon became 270 tonnes of branded Viatex to re-surface the motorway, so Wickwar started mixing the asphalt and the Planning Team looked for hauliers in the area to get the material to site. All this was successfully achieved and despite huge traffic volumes the material was dispatched, laid and the motorway was fully re-opened early on Saturday morning.
Just as the business was reviewing this reactive and successful conclusion, Eurovia called again, this time on the same motorway but in the Bristol area. 60t of Viatex material was required on Saturday evening. Rugby again took control and worked with Asphalt Operations at Wickwar and Logistics to ensure the emergency repair was made and motorway fully operational on Sunday. On Monday 7th August Brett Coupland contacted us to thank everyone for their commitment and response to the two unplanned events. As a result Eurovia have opened up dialogue to create a formal arrangement on both proactive and reactive supplies in to their recently awarded contract. The above situations are an excellent demonstration of the environment asphalt operates in at times and how we have to react and work with one of our key customers.
And our asphalt drivers go the extra miles! The asphalt drivers at Wickwar (who had already completed their day’s work) were asked to take material to the M5 repair, and set off without hesitation despite knowing that this would be ‘a late one’. However, due to a decision on site to re-open the motorway to ease traffic backlog, they were left stranded and unprepared on the side of the motorway. After a walk of a couple of miles to the nearest restaurant the team returned to their trucks to wait, having to endure abusive comments of some irate motorists telling them to “get on with it”, not realising why they ‘appeared’ to be not working…. After several hours the work restarted and the motorway finally re-opened.
Well done team and a very special recognition must go to lead driver, Mark Thompson, and drivers, Kevin Hicks, Mark Lovell and Tony Belsten, who, by the time they returned to the Quarry on completion, had all put in a whopping 25½ hour shift each. We are familiar with the strap line “CEMEX, Being the Best for Employees”…. and in this case it was “Employees Being the Best for CEMEX”. Well done to all involved.