Tuesday saw Readymix London undertake a time critical 750m3 pour to military precision in probably London’s busiest area for traffic and arguably the busiest road in that area – City Road. Nigel Bateman takes up the story: “It seemed that every conceivable challenge that could be thrown up at us did.  Laings were not allowed to pump until 8.00am because of the local residents.  There was absolutely no room to manouvre as the last load had to be placed by 5.30pm and the entire site cleared by 6pm.

In a pre-site meeting held before Christmas we informed the customer how this could be achieved, pointing out that in our experience they needed everything on the day to go well because any traffic incident would make it impossible for anyone to get to the site.  Laings were left in no doubt that this was a hell of a risk to them, but if anyone could pull it off we could!

A plan was formed and it was agreed that they would bring in pumps at 7.00am, quietly set them up and confirm the pour the night before allowing us to start loading at 7.00am.  We could load 26 trucks before 8.00am from four different Plants and they had to have the correct rated pumps to start pumping at 8.00am and off load all these within one hour, giving us chance to get ahead.  We kept a very close eye on our tracker system here as the road had to be constantly managed – we did not want too many vehicles on site but had to have enough in case of a road closure so we could keep pour alive.

With all the planning and a fair amount of luck on the day (there were no major traffic incidents) meant the pour was finished by 3.00pm! The customer was over the moon and now expects Friday’s pour to go as well – same time same amount.   We have done pours three times as big as this without any real thought but this one was a real challenge – fingers crossed for Friday now.”