The Minimal Impact of HDD on Communities

Working with Kier we have just completed the installation of a section of 63mm water main on behalf of Anglian Water. Ordinarily, we wouldn't publish what is in effect, a run of the mill job, but on this occasion found that it perfectly demonstrated the versatility of the HDD set-up. It also allows us to demonstrate the huge positive difference that opting for the Directional Drilling method offers to the local community. As you can see from the images below, these works were taking place on very narrow, dead end road. The road is less than 5 meters wide and serves as access to not only more than 10 residential properties but also to several essential businesses. Completing this installation with open trench techniques would have required substantially more plant machinery and site traffic and would have involved limiting or completely preventing access to both residential and business addresses.

​

As you can from the images below, the 24x40 is perfect here, not only is it agile enough to manoeuvre in a tight space, it also has a small enough footprint to be fully set up while allowing traffic to flow unaffected. Furthermore, in the absence of a trench, residents have full access to their houses and the business is functioning as normal. 

​

This job perfectly demonstrated many of the advantages of the HDD method - not only does the lack of reinstatement  works make HDD the most cost effective option but we were we able to complete the installation with no adverse effects to the local community and we were finished quickly; in fact, the time between our arrival and departure was less than 4 hours.