Built on the site of the city’s original old bridges dating back to 1270, and probably at or near the location of the Roman Pons Aelius bridge a thousand years before that, Newcastle’s famous Swing Bridge was due a spot of specialist cleaning for it’s 150th birthday celebrations. Designed and built by the great Victorian industrialist, William Armstrong in 1873 and opened in 1876, it was in its day the largest swing bridge ever built.
We all thought this job is made for Isis Facility Services, a perfect fit for our portfolio of north east landmark buildings which we have had the privilege to assist in the maintenance of for so many years, a fabulous project which we needed to be involved with.
We attended an initial site meeting with the main contractor’s management team from BCE Northern Ltd, you do not need a very close inspection of the bridge to see it has fallen into a pretty sorry state over the years, heavily tagged by graffiti and fly stickers and the paintwork is in a very fragile state. This old girl needed a bit of TLC and a very sympathetic approach to cleaning was required. Our brief was to remove graffiti tags from bridge as best as possible and give it a “soft” clean.
Jet washing the bridge was certainly not an option as any pressure from water jets would certainly obliterate the painted surface of the bridge metal work, making a huge mess of the deck in the process and would almost certainly have an environmental impact on the the River Tyne below. Careful consideration would also have to be given to any detergent to be used during the clean down. The obvious footpath closures and pedestrian management plans had to be organised and due to a very tight timescale to deliver, off peak lane closures and TM (traffic management) had to be organised for the bridge highway elevations to receive a gentle but through clean.
The DOFF system through a brief process of elimination rapidly became the obvious choice of cleaning tool, high temperature water (up to 150* at nozzle) at low pressure and low volume run off. High temperature to assist with cutting through years of traffic film and city centre grime, low pressure should minimise excessive stripping of paint and low volume run off resulting in minimising the run off of dissolved solids and otherwise entering the water course of the Tyne.
Very much staying with the sympathetic cleaning approach, we opted to use our Foamion Unit from Ionic systems, this mixes our chosen chemical to a pre set ratio with water, in our case we required a 75:1 mix, this is mixed in the Foamion unit and injected to the flow of water, which in turn can be delivered to the surface via carbon fibre telescopic pole, through a flocked bristle brush head and agitated to take effect and clean. Once agitated, the surface will be rinsed off using our Reach and Wash system, again using low pressure, low volume water delivered at an approximate flow rate 3 to 4 litres per minute via carbon fibre telescopic water fed poles.
This initial clean paves the way for ongoing restoration and maintenance which is hoped will result in the bridge swinging again in the very near future. A sight all proud Geordies will be pleased to witness.