All round safety at all heighs

The Borough of Croydon is visibly developing into one of South London's most up-and-coming residen­tial districts. Many new apartments are being built here, with one of the latest projects being the 25-storey residential development "Altitude 25". Set to be Croydon's tallest building and a defining urban landmark, this 82 m elliptical tower will comprise 235 residential units when completed. Contractors Foundation Developments Ltd. are using the new Xclimb 60 protection-screen system to ensure the safety of the slab-forming operations.

Twenty protection-screen units enclose the top four floors at a time, so as to safeguard all the slab-forming operations on the structure shell. This room-high en­closure provides complete pro­tection around the accident-prone edges of the floor-slabs where edge falsework and column form­ing operations have to be carried out. Made of trapezoidal sheet, the protection-screen system not only protects the site crew against falls, but also against inclement weather. In a safe, "feel-good" working en­vironment like this, it's no surprise that the forming operations move ahead much better. To facilitate shifting the floor-slab formwork up to the next floor, the protection screen comes with three integral loading platforms. From these, the formwork equipment is lifted by crane to the next forming level.Xclimb 60 can either be lifted and reset by crane, or by handy porta­ble hydraulic units. Either way, the vertical profiles of the protection screen are guided up the side of the structure in positioning shoes, permitting safe, fast and efficient weather-independent repositioning operations even when wind-speeds of up to 72 km/h (45 mph) are ex­perienced. As the site crane was al­ready working to capacity, it was decided in London to go for the hy­draulic option. One hydraulic unit and four hydraulic cylinders are all that is needed to raise two protec­tion-screen units at the same time. In this way, the 83-m-circumference enclosure on the Altitude 25 project is climbed one storey upwards in just one day. During this climb­ing operation, the formwork to the in-situ concrete slabs can stay in place, which greatly speeds up the construction workflow. FDL-Project Manager Matt Callaghan puts it like this: "The Xclimb system gives our people the ideal protection while they're working on the floors un­der construction. The hydraulic lift­ing operation means that the crane stays free, so in the meantime the team can get on with the job of pouring the columns at the slab-edges, using concrete skips." .