Tunnel Cleansing at Battersea Power Station
January 2006

Building and civil engineering services company, the Murphy Group recently appointed Lloyds Environmental to undertake a major cleansing operation at one of London's best-loved landmarks and the largest brick building in Europe, Battersea Power Station.

There are several works tunnels lying under the old power station stretching hundreds of metres beneath the river Thames which require de-commissioning before the site can be handed over for a multi-million pound building development.

The 1920's built tunnels were originally used to supply the power to the whole of central London via a steam turbine generator and now need to be made good before a huge project commences above the tunnels. This will see hundreds of luxury new apartments, a hotel, park, sports centre and conference forum built around the shell of the historic listed building creating a new hub on the riverfront.

Lloyds Environmental's task was to make an initial Pre-Clean and then fully Deep Clean the old, disused tunnels which had fallen into poor condition. Thieves had cut open parts of the cabling which runs through the tunnels, taken out the valuable copper rods and left insulating oil to spill along the hundreds of metres of tunnel ways. Years of pressure from the River Thames above had also resulted in leaks to the outer lying tunnel walls causing flooding and much oily water.

With such a long period between tunnel cleanses, the aged oil and sludges on the tunnel floors were highly viscous, enough to take your boots off!

In our Pre-Cleanse operation we sprayed the entire tunnel interior with the environmentally-friendly solvent degreaser Redsolve™ and pumped out quantities of oily waters using our Super Vactor, a high-pressure, high-volume combination unit with the very latest liquid ring vacuum pump systems.

For the subsequent Deep Cleanse operation we introduced a specialist oil-absorbing powder called BioCat™ for the first time with excellent results. The final operation brought in high-pressure jet cleaning equipment using confined space trained personnel. The entire tunnel cleansing project took around 2 months from start to finish with a terrific result at the end.