The Day Our Equipment Saved A Life: The QuadGuard
Project Background
RPM Hire offers full turn-key solutions to ensure your project requirements are fulfilled efficiently from beginning to end. With 10+ years of high-quality service delivery and site safety compliance partnership with Australia’s largest companies and infrastructure projects.
RPM Hire was engaged to provide and install a fleet of temporary road safety barriers and the appropriate crash cushion solutions for a major freeway upgrade project in Melbourne.
RPM Hire supplied and installed a large quantity of temporary concrete barriers and over 20 x QuadGuard crash cushions for our client.
The barrier installation process involved working closely with our client to ensure safety and project requirements were completed to the highest standards. The process consisted of vigorous checks to make sure the equipment was deemed compliant and installed as per the manufacturer’s assembly guidelines, then signed off by our dedicated barrier experts.
For a package of the works, RPM Hire managed the whole process including Transport with up to 25 x Semi trucks per night, Cranes and Dogmen, Labour to install the Crash cushions and appropriately experienced supervisors. RPM managed driver inductions, strict safety protocols, and efficient unloading methodologies to achieve great efficiencies.
Why use Quadguards, or other crash cushions?
One of the main principles of crash barrier design is not to create a bigger hazard than what you’re trying to protect, in this case, the road users and site workers. The concrete barriers were implemented to protect the road workers, with the addition of the QuadGuard crash cushion protecting the blunt ends of the concrete barriers.
Essentially in this example the Quadguards are there to protect the road users from an impact with the end of the concrete barrier run, which in the absence of a crash cushion would have been a blunt object.
QuadGuard Impact
On the 12th of May 2021, the QuadGuard on the major freeway project was impacted by a motorist traveling at an estimated speed of 170km/h. The motorist was immediately air-lifted to the nearest hospital and fortunately managed to escape with only a broken leg.
In this instance, the QuadGuard performed successfully and did exactly what it was designed to do. Even though the tested and rated impact speed for the QuadGuard is 100 km/h ( Mash TL-3) the QuadGuard was able to perform perfectly as designed and reduce the severity of impact, therefore minimising extensive injuries and in this particular case a certain death.
Within 90 minutes of the crash occurring the RPM Hire barrier experts were on the scene to remove the impacted QuadGuard and installed a new QuadGuard unit, ensuring the road could be then safely reopened.
Solution
RPM Hire supplied and installed over 18 kilometers of concrete barriers and over 20 x QuadGuard crash cushions to ensure adequate protection was provided for the road workers and road users, throughout the project period.
