Balfour Beatty Civil Engineering Ltd

Sensitive environmental issues on coastal defences

Birse Coastal undertook two large sea defence schemes simultaneously in the same part of west Lancashire: ▪ A £66m scheme for Blackpool Council ▪ Just five miles along the coast, an £18 million scheme for Wyre Borough Council at Cleveleys.

Local precasting saves huge shipments of wet concrete - and eliminates hazards

To avoid the environmental impacts of transporting and placing several thousand wagon-loads of wet concrete into the sea, we devised a creative solution. We formed an alliance with our business partner SLP to precast concrete units. To save environmental damage from excessive haulage, a factory was purpose-built at Thornton, just a few miles from both sites.

Local precasting produced extra green benefits, eliminating environmental hazards such as reinforcement steel from the tidal zone. It reduced congestion on the busy seafront, and enabled us to achieve an architectural standard of finish in a difficult environment.

We used fill materials recycled from local sources - including a multistorey carpark in Blackpool, demolished under a separate contract. At Cleveleys, all existing promenade, walls, redundant structures and material from a beach clean-up exercise were processed on site and re-used as fill.

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