Teams from Lanes Drainage Services UK are supporting contractors building major new healthcare facilities at Shropshire’s largest acute hospital.

Their drainage expertise is helping groundworks specialists prepare the site for a new critical care unit and urgent treatment centre at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital.

Lanes has also used its specialist lining capabilities to rehabilitate a foul sewer in support of the transformation scheme, which will also improve a range of other acute hospital services.

Drainage engineers from the Lanes Chester depot have been commissioned by groundworks specialist J A Burke Construction, working on behalf of Integrated Health Projects (IHP), a joint venture between VINCI Building and Sir Robert McAlpine.

IHP Project Manager Gordon McCartin said: “Lanes Group’s work has provided valuable specialist input into our drainage design process for the new hospital development.

“We were also impressed with the way its lining team responded flexibly, with dynamic working methods, in using a drainage access point that was within a live fire escape route. They did a good job and showed their experience in completing their work on time.”

Lanes Chester Area Development Manager Jana Baker said: “We’re extremely pleased that J A Burke Construction has selected Lanes to support this very exciting and important project.

“Carrying out drainage investigations and remediation is one of the critical first steps to refurbishing buildings or constructing new ones over previously developed sites.

“Our experience of working in live environments, like busy hospitals, has been helping project partners meet their challenging deadlines so the programme is delivered in a timely way.

“Supporting large, complex projects like this is central to our offer as a business. We can bring together expert teams and specialist assets in any required combination, where and when they’re needed.”

A key task has been to install an 27-metre long liner in a 150mm diameter cast iron foul sewer serving the hospital’s accident and emergency department.

A CCTV drainage survey had shown the pipe was heavily corroded, increasing the risk of blockages and both leaks and water ingress.

A Picote Miller remote-access mechanical pipe cleaning device was first used to scour the inside of the pipe, to remove corroded material.

Lanes Group’s Sewer Rehabilitation and Lining Division then installed an LED light cured in place pipe (CIPP) liner to create a new pipe within a pipe, with a design life of 50 years.

The liner – made from flexible glass-fibre matting combined with a layer of specialist resin – had to be installed from a chamber outside the building to another one located in a public corridor inside A&E department.

This required the work to be carried out while the internal space was temporarily closed for other refurbishment tasks to be completed.

LED CIPP lining was selected because, using this technique, the Lanes Group team only needed continuous access to the external chamber, to invert the liner into the pipe with compressed air.

In this way, the solution caused least inconvenience to contractors working in the corridor.

Once the liner was in place, the resin was cured by pulling a computer-controlled IMS MAXIcure LED light array along the pipe, a process that took less than two hours.

Installing no-dig LED liners in this way is energy-efficient, creates very little waste, and avoids the need for pipes to be excavated and replaced, making them highly sustainable solutions.

Projects can also be completed in the shortest possible time, making them ideal for rehabilitating wastewater pipes in extremely busy, live environments, like hospitals.

During a subsequent visit, a team from the Lanes Chester depot cleaned and surveyed the in situ drainage system across the main development site.

Jana Baker explained: “The construction team needed to know the extent, location and condition of the current drainage system so they could be clear which parts would be kept and incorporated into the new buildings and which parts would be redundant.

“This involves a jet vac tanker team working together with a CCTV drainage survey engineer to clean lines, allowing a remotely controlled robotic camera to be sent along pipes to gather the data needed.”

The process will result in J A Burke and IHP having a highly accurate drainage system map for the development site, showing all foul and surface water connections with the wide network, and the type and condition of all assets.

The work at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital (RSH) is part of the Hospitals Transformation Programme being delivered by the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust.

The emergency deport at RSH is being refurbished, remodelled and extended to include a new critical care unit, urgent treatment centre and ambulance receiving area.

Other elements of the programme include improved consultant-led maternity and neo-natal services, a new children’s centre, with inpatient and surgery facilities, a new main entrance, and around 100 extra parking spaces.

Founded in 2003, IHP is a leading provider of outstanding healthcare solutions. It has been appointed on over 250 projects, with a combined value of c£3.7billion, supporting more than 90 NHS and local authority clients.

J A Burke is one of the UK’s leading full-service groundworks and civil engineering sub-contractors, supporting leading principal contractors across all sectors, including retail, education, health, and transport.