The roof on the Old British Royal Infirmary in Bristol was being replaced and in doing this, a temporary roof needed to be lifted on to enable this to happen, to keep the Grade 2 Listed Building watertight.
As can be seen in the photos the access was extremely tight on width and height to get into the courtyard with the Spiering’s SK1265-AT6 eLift. Matt Tutton, showed great skill and precision in manoeuvring the 16.3m Long x 3m Wide Mobile Tower crane underneath the building. When inside the courtyard the crane position itself was on sloping ground, therefore the crane needed to be jacked up onto sleepers to allow the crane to be level in order to carry out the operation.
Initially the Main Contractor had engaged another lifting company to look at the job for the same size crane, but they said “they couldn’t access the courtyard via the underpass” and that the main contractor would have to knock down walls and create a different access on the perimeter. The main contractor wanted a second opinion and asked Sparrow to take a look, in which Dave Heath carried out the initial site visit. Dave said it was doable to access via the underpass, removing the requirement to knock anything down. The customer wanted to use Sparrow as they had complete confidence in us to complete the job. Dave carried out a second visit with the crane operator Matt Tutton to walk him through the site, so he knew what to expect and discuss the best manoeuvring methods to get into the courtyard.
Operational complexities were the extremely close proximity of the helipad of the New BRI Hospital, to the Old Building which was 45m away. The Crane used a shorter jib (52m) than the typical 60m, to minimise impacted tip height to the flight path of incoming air ambulances. A constant line of communication between the lift team and the helipad was required in the event of an incoming helicopter, in which Matt would need to take the 52m Jib out of Luff to allow it to become flat which drops the tip height to 37.2m.
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