Multevo has helped Essex Highways achieve more efficient patching and preparation works prior to surface treatment works as part of a new trial.
Essex Highways faced the challenge of getting its conventional equipment onto certain rural parts of the county for preparation of several sites in the Wethersfield and Langham areas of the county. Also, these areas were overgrown with hedges overhanging the single lane sites as well as verge creep protruding the carriageway which needed to be sided out before work started. Some of the sites had also suffered from flooding and surface water run off causing the carriageway to be immersed in spoil which required scraping.
Multevo were tasked with preparing the site and were up against a tight schedule of works to allow surface treatments to commence as soon as possible. Using the company’s Multihog and its multi-skilled team, Multevo were able to deal with the spoil using the Multihog’s front bucket before sweeping, and the siding and sweeping were carried out in a single visit. The swift delivery helped to minimise disruption and improve the efficiency of the project. Instead of using larger 1m planers, the Multevo team could access areas by self-driving the Multihog 400mm planer, only removing the required defective areas and reducing waste. The team subsequently switched to the front-mounted road planer with dust suppression attachments to plane down to a depth of 100mm to permanently repair patches.
There were 81 patch repairs totalling 657.19 sqm of on the project. Multevo independently programmed the works and recorded progress via the Multevo app, allowing the team to monitor progress, undertake quality site and vehicle audits. These reports were also shared with Essex Highways in real time so they could also see progress.
Using conventional equipment, this work would have required several contractors working with different equipment at different stages of the process.
Andrew Vale, Senior Engineer and Team Leader for Surface Treatments at Essex Highways said:
“This was an impressive performance by the Multevo team who completed a number of jobs in one single visit using the Multihog machine. The jobs were not easy with access being tight as well as the time. There was minimal disruption and only a small amount of traffic management required. This proved that this sort of approach using equipment that can carry out multiple tasks at once has provided us with value in terms of improving the quality and output of our preparation works before surface treatments were started. The patching work was quick and efficient and competitively priced, and we had real-time information on the progress of the job which has proved useful.”
Essex Highways is a long-term partnership between Ringway Jacobs and Essex County Council, one of the largest non-metropolitan (‘shire’) counties in England, stretching for 60 miles from coastal Harwich, via rural countryside to suburban London. It has a population of 1.4m and over 5,000 miles of road.
Multevo is the UK distributor of the versatile Multihog product range which is a road legal articulated compact multi-purpose vehicle designed to accept different attachments to the front and rear. Each attachment is designed bespoke to the Multihog to outperform the equipment it replaces, enabling the machine to be utilised for a wide variety of different highway maintenance applications instantaneously to maximise productivity and efficiency on site.
