Across Australia & New Zealand on urban and arterial road works sites, the most common barrier in use is a plastic water filled barrier. When these barriers were introduced circa 1995, they were a great solution, greatly improving road construction safety at the time.
However, time moves on and innovation around barriers to suit these road construction sites have produced better alternatives.
The issues with water filled barriers are numerous and well known.
- Deflection performance, at MASH TL-2 deflection ranging from 3.6-4.1m. A typical lane width for urban roads is 2.7m-2.8m.
- Asset life, plastic barriers typically last 5-7 years before requiring replacement.
- Time to fill, each 2-meter barrier requires 6-10 minutes to fill. A deployment of 150m requires 9 hours to fill the barriers. We have heard reports of installations of 1200 meters (while not typical in length) taking 9 days to fill all the barriers and become compliant.
- Water consumption, with Australia routinely in drought, and now Auckland in a severe drought, why are we wasting this precious resource on road barriers, when there are alternatives?
- Post deployment, leak checking and repair. After every deployment a plastic barrier must be checked for leaks and if required, repaired. This is time consuming and costly.
Why switch to a Defender Free Standing Barrier?
- Deflection performance, at MASH TL-2 deflection is 1.2m, that’s a minimum of 67% less than plastic water filled barriers.
- Asset life, steel barriers typically last 20 years if not impacted.
- Deployment Time Savings, when a Defender Free Standing Steel barrier is deployed, once it is on the ground and connected together, it is a barrier, there is no requirement to wait for water trucks. A deployment of 150m of Defender Free Standing Steel barrier can be completed in 1:15 minutes, saving the contractor 9 hours of water filling time.
- No water required.
- Post deployment, they simply need a visual inspection and possibly a power wash.
Isn’t it time to move away from “this is the way we’ve always done it” and explore better performing, more environmentally friendly solutions to urban and arterial road construction safety barriers?