EJ McGrath Hosts VR Working with Plant & Buried Services Training with Galliford Try

Our Weston-super-Mare team swapped desks for headsets this week, taking part in an immersive virtual reality training session on working safely with plant and buried services, delivered in partnership with Galliford Try.

Instead of a classroom and a slide deck, operatives were put inside realistic site scenarios. They had to work around moving plant and identify buried services before breaking ground, making decisions, and mistakes, in real time with no real-world consequences. Standing in a digger’s blind spot or putting a tool through a live cable in VR teaches a lesson that sticks far better than being told about it in a toolbox talk.

This is core to what we do. As a groundworks and civils contractor, our crews spend their days alongside excavators and dumpers, and digging close to live gas, electricity, water and comms. Two of the biggest risks on any groundworks site are the plant and people interface and striking a buried service, and both can be serious or fatal. Getting the basics right, exclusion zones and banksmen around plant, and scan, locate and dig safely around services in line with HSG47, is what keeps people safe and the job moving. It is also why we run our own vacuum excavation unit, the T-VAC 2, to expose live services without destructive digging.

We are grateful to Galliford Try for hosting the session and bringing this technology to our team. It is a good example of a Tier 1 contractor and its supply chain pulling in the same direction on safety culture.

Investing in our people and the way we train them is something we take seriously, and judging by the focus in the room, the headsets went down well.