Ground Engineering Awards: Seven Nominations Lucky?
Soil Engineering have reached the final of the Ground Engineering Awards, celebrating the achievements of people, projects & businesses across the Geotechnical sector. We’re thrilled that our teams’ efforts have been recognised in seven categories ranging from Ground Engineering Specialist of the Year, to Community Engagement Award. With a number of joint entries featuring some of our biggest clients, it also shows what outstanding collaborative work has been completed in the last 18 months.
Individual Achievement
We’re hoping to win Ground Investigation Specialist of the Year, reflecting our nation-wide ability to deliver high quality Ground Investigation in a variety of settings, whilst growing the business and improving sustainability. Achieving a profitable record year’s turnover in 2020, whilst also achieving 1 million working hours accident free was a critical landmark. We have been shortlisted for Specialist Geotechnical Supplier, built upon providing exceptional service to Principal Contractors including BBV JV & EKFB JV (both on HS2) through our GI activities, and GI & Grouting Services to The Coal Authority & United Utilities. Collaborative working practices have made a huge difference to project deliverability, with our teams maintaining dialogues between several clients to maximise resource availability and achieve project milestones.
Collaboration
Our entry for UK Project with a Geotechnical Value Between £500k & £1M was submitted in partnership with our client, The Coal Authority, and focussed on the Mitchell Street project in Coatbridge. We delivered a geotechnically & logistically complex programme of GI & Grouting, all within a residential area. The project was the subject of a short film earlier this year – you can click and go straight to our YouTube channel to find out more. We’re shortlisted for UK Project with Geotechnical Value Between £1M & £3M for the Torside Impounding Reservoir project in conjunction with United Utilities. This grouting project demonstrated a well delivered technical solution, supply chain collaboration, stakeholder management, and the added complication of tight timescales to meet external pressures.
United Utilities’ Haweswater Aqueduct Resilience Programme (HARP) also sees us jointly shortlisted for several awards within the project delivery team. The Community Engagement Award (with United Utilities, Bell Ingram, The Brow n Rural Partnership, Geotechnics and Socotec) reflects the extensive land liaison and third party management undertaken to facilitate this large scale investigation. United Utilities also head a grand alliance of four Ground Investigation Contractors (including Soil Engineering) and four Consultancies in the Ground Investigation Project of the Year category for the HARP project. In our final named shortlisting we’re a partner in the HARP nomination for UK Geotechnical Team of the Year, as one of the 12-strong delivery group responsible for making the project possible.
Group Achievements
Beyond the seven categories we’re named contributors to, we’re also delighted to see several projects shortlisted in which we undertook early ground investigations. Of course it’s also fantastic to see that our group companies both in the UK and globally are recognised in so many categories, shortlisted a total of twenty times!
Industry Development
Finally, we’d like to express our congratulations to our industry body, the British Drilling Association, shortlisted for the Manual for Rotary Drilling. An invaluable guide to the safe operation of rotary drilling equipment, and best practice for the safe recovery of high quality samples and data, this document’s success won’t really be measured by awards, but by continued improvement in drilling practice. Its a definite “go-to” in the delivery of our projects, and can be downloaded here for free.
Several of our team will be attending the Ground Engineering Awards dinner next week, and hopefully they’ll be bringing home another trophy or two to add to the cabinet.
