As part of the UK’s largest Private Finance Initiative (PFI), Skanska Innisfree is undertaking a £1bn major redevelopment of St. Bartholomew’s (Barts) and The Royal London Hospitals. This comprises the design, construction, operation and maintenance of the hospitals over a 30-year period. The project is being carried out in phases to allow the hospitals’ services and activities to continue 24 hours a day throughout the program. The safety of patients, staff and visitors is a top priority. Skanska wanted to ensure the highest air quality be maintained for the duration of this very large construction project.

The key environmental issues related to air quality are the occurrence of elevated levels of construction dust resulting from the demolition and building of projects. Two specific particulates have been identified as possible contributors to health hazards including respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses.
Bureau Veritas established“First-Line” defenses to mitigate emissions of these at their source by utilizing techniques such as “damping down,” which was up to 95% effective in reducing fine particles from demolition sites. Its dust monitoring protocol provides a robust “Second-Line” defense for managing construction dust at the sites. An automated “e-mail and text” alert system sends real time data. When dust levels are elevated, this system provides an early warning to the construction team and also compares the data with local background sites, to help determine the origin of the elevated levels.

During the numerous pollution episodes London has encountered it has been difficult to discriminate between regional or local pollution from alert information alone. Bureau Veritas designed a password protected, web-based, real-time data dissemination system to trace the “time varying” dust levels from the two hospitals and two local urban background sites. This provided Skanska with a quick indicative method by which they could provisionally check the regional or local status alerts during a pollution incident, thereby enabling the project management to take effective corrective action on the St. Bartholomew’s and The Royal London Hospital sites when relevant data indicate they are indeed the source.