The Human Cost of the Green Revolution
Few people could argue against the need to protect the environment from man’s past misdemeanours. But that protection can come at a high and sometimes fatal cost.
It is five years since the boiler house at the Didcot A Power Station collapsed, killing four demolition workers. With the Health and Safety Executive’s seemingly endless machinations still on going and with an investigation by Thames Valley Police taking an age to resolve, the cause of that incident remains a mystery wrapped in multiple layers of bureaucracy and mile upon mile of red tape. Was the boiler house faulty or defective in some way? Did the demolition contractor do something to undermine the integrity of the structure? Was something missed in the planning of the construction or the planning of the demolition? More than 1,800 days after the accident happened, we still don’t know.
What we do know is the trigger that set in motion a chain of events that would result in the deaths of four men. That trigger was a desire to safeguard the environment. And that chain of events began some 15 years before the fatal collapse.
Chain of Events
The Large Combustion Plant Directive was a European Union directive that required member states of the European Union to legislatively limit flue gas emissions from combustion plants with a thermal capacity of 50 MW or greater. The directive applied to fossil fuel power stations, and specified emission limits for sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and dust. The directive was issued in October 2001.
Under the terms of the directive, combustion plants built after 1987 had to comply with those specific emissions limits. From 2007, plants built earlier than that could either opt to comply with the emissions limits, or ‘opt out’. Plants that opted out were limited to a maximum of 20,000 hours of further operation, and had to close completely by the end of 2015. Together with eight other plants, Didcot A Power Station opted out. It ceased operation on 22 March 2013, less than three years before the worst UK demolition disaster in human history.
Harm’s Way
For decades, the demolition industry has worked to push men (and women) further and further from the danger zone of a notoriously hazardous industry. From the early mechanisation, through the development of dedicated high each excavators and remotely-controlled “demolition robots”, the human element of demolition has diminished with each passing year.
Then came the need and the legislative drive to recycle. Demolition folk were already past masters at recycling, repurposing and reselling materials won from their demolition works as a matter of course. It is not unusual for a UK demolition contractor to recycle upwards of 95% of all materials from a demolition project. Indeed, the very notion of sending potentially valuable materials to landfill is anathema to the demolition fraternity.
But with the imposition of the Landfill Tax in 1996, the demolition man’s reluctance to dispose of anything became a legal imperative.
And it worked. The Landfill Tax reduced by three-quarters the amount of waste sent to UK landfill sites each year in just three years. As the cost of the tax has risen, so the amount of waste — and the number of licensed landfill sites able to accept it — has continued to decline.
But the resulting need to recover and recycle increasingly small fragments of metals, timber, plastics, glass and other materials required a simultaneous increase in human intervention. Men (and women) that had been pushed further and further from the work face were now required to manually segregate fragments of material too small to be handled cost-effectively by machines.
As the amount of materials being sent to landfill decreased, the number of men and women suffering cuts, grazes and other more serious injuries increased. Like their counterparts killed tragically in the Didcot Disaster, they too were the unseen victims of the Green Revolution.
Silent Killer?
All of which brings us to the present day and the next potential hazard conceived with the very best environmental intentions.
With diesel fuel as popular today as fossil fuel power stations were when the EU instigated the Large Combustion Plant Directive back in 2001, manufacturers of vehicles and a range of demolition and construction equipment are eyeing electricity as the fuel of the future.
There are those that will argue — with some justification — that electric-powered cars and excavators are still an environmental burden, and that many (though not all) will continue to draw their power from less-than-clean power stations. But that is to overlook the ability of electric powered machines to work silently and with zero emissions on inner city sites. Certainly, anyone operating a machine indoors or near a school or a hospital would be wise to look first at the electric option.
But there remains a hazard. And I can tell you from personal experience that the threat is very real.
Several years ago, I had the enormous pleasure of test-driving a Tesla sports car. It was amazing. Incredible. To this day, it remains my dream car.
But during that test drive, I became aware of the potential problem of a car that runs so quietly that you can hear the tyres engaging with the road. I put my foot down and enjoyed the feeling of being forced back into my seat by the sheer force of acceleration. It was only when I looked down that I realised that acceleration had taken me about 60 miles per hour beyond the local speed limit.
The sound of an engine, it transpires, is very important. And not just for those sat within.
Bitter Irony
Each year, demolition and construction workers are struck by mobile equipment while working on site. That equipment today is slow, lumbering, ponderous and — above all — noisy. Whether it is an excavator or a wheel loader, a site dumper or a skid steer, the imminent arrival of each machine is heralded by the mechanical roar of a diesel engine.
The new generation of electric powered machines are veritable Ninjas by comparison; silent potential assassins that move almost soundlessly across site. Site workers, many of them wearing ear defenders, will not hear them coming.
Now of course, those in the field of construction and demolition equipment — like those in automotive design — have developed proximity sensors to alert machine operators when someone is close by. Many machines are also fitted with near 360-degree cameras that afford the operator with unprecedented levels of visibility.
But the fact remains that in our desire to tick the box marked “environmental compliance”, we may have inadvertently also ticked the box marked “increased danger”.
And therein lies the bitter irony. In our scramble to protect the planet for the many, that protection has increased exponentially the threat to the few.
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