Diamond Drilling & Hydraulic Bursting at the Royal Marsden

What was it issue?

As a pioneering cancer treatment facility, The Royal Marsden were updating their radiation machinery – enabling them to continue providing lifesaving services to their patients. However, their latest accusation was both larger and heavier than the existing walls and floor plan could accommodate. They needed our help to remove the reinforced concrete walls and floors so that they could get their new machine up and running as soon as possible.

Why was it tricky?

The Marsden’s existing interior structure is heavily reinforced and substantial, it was going to take quite some specialist machinery to cut through them. On top of this, all work needed to be carried out in a fully functioning hospital – our works couldn’t impact on the vital treatment of the patients so we had to carefully select cutting and removal techniques that would mitigate noise and disruption throughout the reconfiguration process.

What did we do?

To make space for the radiation equipment we needed to remove some of the reinforced concrete projections from the hospital’s corridors and form a rectangular opening in the concrete basement floor to accommodate the size and load of this new equipment.

With minimal disruption (and dust) in mind, the team chose to wire saw the walls and remove the debris with an electric Hi Tip wheel barrow – preventing disruptive percussive breaking methods from causing disruption. For the floor a combination of diamond stitch drilling and concrete bursting was decided upon, where diamond drilled holes were cut into the isolated floor block and a hydraulic bursting head was then inserted into the holes and expanded with immense pressure in order to crack the concrete into manageable lumps for removal.

Thanks to our team’s expertise and ingenuity the techniques worked brilliantly, and we were able to complete the work for this organisation on time, on budget and with a very happy client. If you have a project that needs a skilled approach we’d love to help, do get in touch.