WHERE LAND & WATER MEET

In November of last year Awesome Earthmovers visited a saltmarsh restoration project in Chichester, run by the specialist civil engineering company Land & Water.

“THEY ARE THE GO-TO SPECIALIST FOR MAINTAINING THE UNITED KINGDOM’S WETLAND HABITATS”

We’re back with Land & Water and this time on a bank side in Bedfordshire, seeing the testing of two brand-new Hitachi’s, a ZX210 and ZX250 - converted to amphibious machines with EIK pontoons. The medium size excavators being put through their paces ahead of a project taking place later in the year.

As the name suggests Land & Water have been focussing on working in the environment where Land & Water meet, for over 30 years. They are the go-to specialist for maintaining the United Kingdom’s wetland habitats and have a wealth of experience dredging, repairing, maintaining and constructing water courses and wetlands. Land & Water rely on an experienced team to design, deliver and support these works. Land & Water have a fleet of specialist plant machinery to allow them to work safely and efficiently in this challenging environment. For working from the land or on the bankside, the fleet consists of long reach excavators, low ground pressure excavators and tracked dumpers. When working on the water, there is a broad fleet of tugs, barges, dredgers, floating welfare, weed cutting boats and pontoons that would allow plant machinery weighing over 100 tonnes to work on the water.

In the area between the land and the water, the business also operates some amphibious machines in the form of excavators and smaller multi-use Truxor machines. All of these are available for hire nationwide and due to the specialist nature have even been deployed a number of times internationally – including locations such as France, Ireland, Spain, The Caribbean and even Azerbaijan.

Land & Water bought their first amphibious excavator over 20 years ago in the form of an OEM (Japanese domestic market built) Hitachi MA 125. These machines were designed to work on very soft terrain (marshes, mud flats, etc) but are buoyant enough to float. And when fitted with additional side floats and spud legs they can work in water depths up to 2m deep. The current fleet includes amphibious excavators with the upper structure sizes across the range including 3t, 5t, 7t, 13t and now 22 and 28 tonnes (the ZX 210-7 and 250-7 long reach).

The new machines all feature in house built hi visibility walkways that reduce the risks associated with access and egress. They are also both fitted with Safety Shield Global's Human Form Recongnition (HFR) camera systems and the Digital Thumbs Up (DTU) systems because although unlikely to need them when working on soft terrain, the machines will need to return to a designated area to fuel up and for daily inspections. Both new machines are being fitted with Leica GPS for their first rental to suit the customers’ requirements. Further specification includes reversible high and low flow auxiliary circuits to allow a variety of attachments to be used and a Hill fully automatic quick hitch. As with all excavators working on or near water, Land & Water’s fleet is run on Panolin biodegradable hydraulic oil.

Regarding transport between sites, the smaller machines are straightforward to transport but the newer, larger, machines are a little more challenging - the ZX 210-7 can just move on larger UK roads with the tracks retracted in transport position (4.5m wide, 13.7m long and 4.2m tall). The ZX 250-7 however is too large and is designed to be dismantled for transport. This consists of a lorry for each track and one for the excavator’s upper structure with the walkway and side pontoons travelling on separate vehicles.

As for operator competence and certification, all 360 excavator qualified operators can operate the amphibious excavators, but they must successfully complete an in house developed, 2 level training course (one for standard operation and one for when in water that includes the operation of side tanks and spuds), run by qualified trainers.

Due to the awkward nature of the environment they work in, Land & Water manage their amphibious fleet with a proactive maintenance regime which includes more regular engineer inspections and immediate replacement of any worn or suspect parts. Land & Water support these machines when working with an additional personnel support vehicle that allows an engineer to travel to and maintain a machine should there be a fault or a need to evacuate an operator.