A Streetwise Approach to Vital New Lighting Improvement Scheme

Fitzgerald Contractors and our client Sandwell Council joined together to celebrate reaching the milestone of installing 4,000 new energy-saving SOX LED street lighting lanterns. For Phase 1 of the SOX Lantern Replacement Scheme the team are using new digital technology to bring huge benefits compared to traditional lighting – reducing whole life costs for the council and its residents and cutting carbon emissions. The LED lights can be centrally controlled and monitored, use less energy and need significantly less maintenance.

The street lighting installations are taking place in a very dynamic working environment across multiple urban and city locations, often for very short periods of time typically lasting less than one day and with significant interface with the general public.

Fitzgerald Contractors Project Manager Paul Corry said: ‘Ensuring safe and sufficient working areas at each site location is one of the key challenges we’ve faced and our approach has been to look at each site individually and create a bespoke plan. An example of this is scheduling our works to be carried out in the evening to avoid key events / peak traffic periods which is safer and least disruptive for stakeholders. Hats off to the team’s collective efforts in completing works safely and to a high-quality standard.’

To date Fitzgerald have delivered £3 million of schemes over the past 3 years where we have worked collaboratively with our supply chain partner Hilton Main at both preconstruction and post construction. We have been successful in meeting this challenging programme through strong client and stakeholder working relationships and utilising digital technology in real-time to work smarter and mitigate impacts at site locations.