Delicate SCADA Equipment That Would Not Fit The Door

Coyle Group provided a safety officer for a client in Northern Ireland in 2017. The project was the construction of nine wind turbines on farmland in County Antrim, and the work looked routine until the kick-off meeting.

At that meeting the team realised the Farm Control Unit and SCADA system would not fit through the control room door of the substation. The equipment was delicate, it was far too heavy to be handled manually, and it needed to go in on its side to clear the opening. A bespoke and safe solution was required before anything could move.

The immediate problem was moving one unit into one building, but the deeper cause was a design issue with the substation itself. The door had been specified without allowing for the size of the equipment it would need to receive, which turned a simple delivery into a high-risk manual lift.

Getting this wrong could have damaged expensive, delicate equipment or injured the people handling it. It had to be solved with a plan that treated the lift as a controlled operation rather than an improvised push through a doorway.

Our safety officer contacted the relevant client manager to gather all the data on the unit. With that in hand, we built a replica to mirror the size of the panel, then trialled a couple of portable lifting solutions on site with the contracted hire company. Once the trial had been dynamically risk-assessed and completed, he put together the paperwork for the customer to complete and sign off.

The lift then took place exactly as set out in the Risk Assessment Method Statement and Lift Plan, and the unit was moved into position for the technicians to install. The lesson did not stop there. The site team carried it to their next project, where consultation between our officer and the Principal Contractor's Project Manager saw the sister-site substation door resized, so the unit was simply wheeled into position on a pallet truck.