Stored in many buildings at the MOD’s 140-acre vehicle storage depot at Ashchurch, near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, are around 7,500 military vehicles, including everything from quad bikes to Challenger 2 main battle tanks; the UK’s immediate and strategic military and armoured fighting vehicle reserve.
As some 36 buildings (and their contents) on the site were found to be contaminated with asbestos, a joint military and civilian operation under the supervision of the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) – code named Op WINDFIRM – began decontamination work in summer 2019. During the project, Ashchurch’s equipment support to the Field Army was suspended until decontamination had been completed, and the HSE agreed testing protocols and standard operating procedures to enable vehicle movement to resume.
Construction of the Central Vehicle Depot Ashchurch, as the site was originally known, commenced during World War Two, with further storage sheds constructed in the early 1950s. While building types vary, common to most are corrugated asbestos concrete sheet clad roofs, pipework and guttering.
An initial HSE inspection of the site found no non-compliance with asbestos management health and safety legislation; quite the opposite. At the time, the inspector wrote: “We concluded that there were areas, based on evident risk, where you appear to be taking measures far in excess of what the law requires.” Instead, what appears to have been an unfortunate combination of the deleterious effects of moss growth, a seagull colony and strong winds worked together to destroy the roofs – and that had a significant impact on the military plant stored there.
“The fibres and debris had got into every nook and cranny of the vehicles and stored equipment. The task we faced to decontaminate all these vehicles and equipment was huge,” says REME reservist Maj Tim Spiers, who was sent to Ashchurch as Op WINDFIRM planning and management operations officer.
According to Spiers, two fleets are stored at Ashchurch. The stored equipment fleet (SEF) consists of around 2,000 vehicles of all types, which forms the Field Army’s immediate reserve. It is kept in a climate-controlled environment and is normally serviced and maintained by a team of technicians and mechanics from defence contractor Babcock. The fleet is at readiness and can be deployed at relatively short notice. The other fleet is the stored operational fleet (SOF). This accounts for the majority of vehicles, is not maintained and is not stored in a controlled environment. Some of it has been in storage for well over 10 years.
PLAN OF ATTACK
Continues Spiers: “The first thing we had to do was get safe working and storage spaces established, so we could decontaminate the vehicles and get the Babcock team back in to work on the SEF vehicles once they had been decontaminated and tested free of asbestos. There were some sheds on the site without asbestos roofs, so these were cleared out, decontaminated and used for this purpose.
“The project required a multi-agency approach. We had a civilian environmental services contractor MSS Group who did the cleaning and contamination removal, a contractor who undertook monitoring and sampling and provided assurance that the decontamination was complete, and an Army team of Royal Logistic Corps vehicle support specialists to do all the vehicle movements on and off-site.” To manage the effort, Spiers was assisted by a major from the RLC and two RLC warrant officers.
These best-laid plans soon required bolstering once the team discovered the vehicles’ poor condition, Spiers reports. “It quickly became apparent that the stored vehicles needed mechanical work just to move them out of their sheds to the decontamination area, due to dead batteries, rotten oil and fuel seals, or missing components and assemblies, where parts had been taken off them to repair other vehicles. This meant bringing in a team of REME vehicle mechanics, recovery mechanics and associated trades, as well as a recovery vehicle to drag the vehicles that could not be started out of the sheds.” For their own protection, all military staff had to work in full asbestos PPE with respirators.
The REME team faced challenges of its own. As the tracked armoured vehicles could not be started and moved under their own power, the vehicle depot’s elderly Liebherr tracked tug was used to move them. However, having moved around 100 AFVs its rubber track pads wore out, meaning it didn’t have the traction to pull the heavy vehicles. It transpired that Liebherr had discontinued production of the tug (a converted bulldozer), so the MOD had to commission from it a one-off pair of tracks – which took four months to arrive – before it could be used again. To provide cover during this interlude, Spiers requested assistance from Army HQ to get Challenger Armoured Repair & Recovery Vehicles and crews to rotate through Op WINDFIRM from a REME battalion, and to source a heavy aircraft tug from the RAF.
“The tempo for the project was to clean around 20 to 30 vehicles a day. This was fine for trucks and 4x4 vehicles, but we found the armoured fighting vehicles took much longer. In addition water was not allowed to be used in the decontamination process, and the vehicles could not be brushed, so the vehicles were cleaned using wet wipes and specialist vacuum cleaners,” explains Spiers.
By July 2021, around 5,900 vehicles had been declared free from asbestos and 5,000 moved off-site. Then the team’s attention turned towards the mammoth task of decontaminating circa 108,000 items of Royal Engineer Bridging equipment. At that point, Spiers’s group was joined by a team of 12 Royal Engineers, which moved the REB into newly set-up decontamination zones. The newly-enlarged team consisted of around 110 cleaners from MSS Group, and the REME, RLC and RE personnel had to keep the cleaning lines continually supplied.
As the vehicles rolled off the decontamination line, they were moved on to transporters and then taken to other sites or parked up in clean locations at Ashchurch. This meant during the course of the operation there were in excess of 30,000 individual vehicle moves executed by the team of 20 RLC VSS personnel.
Despite many obstacles, the task was completed in early 2022, five weeks ahead of schedule, and well in advance of a £270 million site rebuild scheduled to start last month.