Churchill Specialist Contracting were employed by British Steel to replace two of the three flare tips and individual igniter units on the 75.0m high triple flare stack at their Scunthorpe works during the 2017, 3 day summer outage.

The replacement of the flare tips would be the first time this had been attempted during the 46 year service life of the structure, so there was therefore a lot of trepidation and uncertainties that were further added to by the narrow outage window.

The project was carried by two NVQ qualified Churchill teams utilising specialist 90.0m truck mounted access mewps supplied by Elev8 and mobile cranes from BJW Crane Hire.

The project was hampered by adverse weather that restricted us in completing the replacement of one unit within the timescale allocated, but most importantly completed without incident whilst at the same time providing invaluable knowledge that will assist with the replacement of the remaining two flare tips.

The planning and professional manner in which the works were executed was acknowledged by British Steel with the presentation of a Health and Safety Excellence award being presented to Churchill Specialist Contracting during their outage awards ceremony held on Thursday 5th October.