Emergency and Out of Hours Cutting

Most of what we do is out of hours by default. Highway work happens inside a night closure, airside work inside a possession, port work between vessel calls, and warehouse work on a shift change. A crew that only operates between eight and five is no use on any of them.

Three things, and none of them is a phone number on a website.

We own the plant. Saws, rigs, power packs and boilers are ours and they live at the yard, so mobilising is a matter of loading rather than finding a hire counter open on a Sunday. We bring our own water, power and access. On a failed slab at two in the morning there is rarely a working standpipe or a three phase supply, and a crew that needs both is a crew that goes home. We are in Kent. The yard is at Linton outside Maidstone, so the M20, the M2, the A20 and the Dartford Crossing are all close, and much of the South East is reachable inside a couple of hours.

A slab that has broken up and become a hazard under traffic. A failed joint shedding material onto a runway or an apron, which is a foreign object debris incident before it is a maintenance problem. A service strike that needs an opening formed around it to get at the damage. Flood or storm damage where drainage has to be cut in. A programme that has slipped and needs the cutting done tonight so the following trade can start in the morning.

Whether it is a job for us, honestly. Emergency work goes wrong when a contractor commits before knowing what is in the slab, so the questions are always the same: how thick, what reinforcement, what is underneath, what access is there, and what has to be true when we leave. If the answer is that the slab needs replacing rather than cutting, or that the safe move tonight is to make it safe and do the work properly on a planned closure, we would rather say so.

Most out of hours work is not an emergency at all, it is simply booked for when the asset can be closed. Night closures under Chapter 8, weekend possessions, airside windows and shift changes are the normal way our concrete cutting, diamond drilling and joint sealing work is delivered, and the programme is built around the window rather than the other way round.

We are based at Little Westerhill Farm near Maidstone in Kent. Kent, London, Sussex, Essex and the wider South East are covered from our own yard, and longer programmes are mobilised UK wide. For anything urgent, call 07768 662153 rather than emailing, and say where the site is and what the surface is doing.