Lanes Group has undertaken a major drainage surveying and cleaning programme as part of a £38 million refurbishment scheme at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.
Drainage engineers from the Lanes Aberdeen depot – working with construction company NG Bailey, on behalf of main contractor, Robertson Group – worked for over six months on the project, which entailed cleaning of drainage downpipes in the largest building on the Foresterhill Health Campus, the Pink Zone Building, as part of a major refurbishment scheme commissioned by NHS Grampian.
The eight-storey building was systematically stripped and refitted floor-by-floor, with medical services and patients moved between floors and zones as the work progressed.
Lanes teams surveyed and cleaned 88 combined foul and rainwater downpipe stacks, with a combined length of 1,500 metres, and surveyed and cleaned 1,000 metres of underground pipework. The CCTV drainage surveys, combined with extensive dye testing, allowed Lanes to map the drainage system and its outflows across the entire building, which will help the hospital’s facilities team maintain the drainage system.
With the steel and cast iron downpipes badly clogged with debris, scale, and residue build-up from sanitation gels and detergents, the team used electro-mechanical pipe cleaning equipment to scrub the insides of the pipes. Residue was vacuumed up from an external manhole by a ‘mini-jet vac’ tanker, selected for its ability to operate in confined spaces.
