News Item

Carillion helps the show go on for the BBC's annual Springwatch wildlife series - 13/06/2012

Support services company Carillion sprung into action at the weekend to help Chris Packham, Michaela Strachan, Martin Hughes-Games and the Springwatch team when their BBC production set was hit by the worst floods in the area for 40 years.

Torrential rain forced the river by their camp in Ynrs-hir, West Wales to burst its banks, cutting the power and halting filming.

After abandoning camp and salvaging what they could the BBC feared they may have to pull the plug on programming - until Carillion workers from a nearby road improvement project came to their aid by providing an alternative production site and together with the local community helping with the clean up and relocation.

On their website, Springwatch blogged: "This was the worst flooding here for nearly 40 years. Our web servers' portacabin weighing over 4 tonnes, was shifted by the sheer force of the water and would have floated off, had it not been tethered to the trucks by its cables. So with a lot of re-cabling, testing, heavy lifting and Glastonbury-style mud, we were able to get our first nest cam live on the web by 5pm on the Sunday. Meanwhile we were kindly offered a temporary production office by a local Carillion construction site, working on improvements to the main road to Aberystwyth."

Julian Wilson, Contract Manager for Carillion Civil Engineering, added: "The flooding in Wales on Friday and Saturday was so bad that the mini village being used by the BBC was under a foot of water, threatening this week's shows. We offered the use of our site conference room and a spare office along with our wi-fi. They were exceedingly grateful and temporarily relocated the team so that production could continue. I know Springwatch is watched by millions of nature lovers around the country, so hopefully we have helped the show go on for them."

"As the flooding was all around where we were working our men on site also went house to house in the area checking on local residents and handing our sandbags where needed. We also did the shopping for one resident whose track had partially washed away."

Carillion is working in Glandyfi on behalf of the Welsh Government to complete road improvements, including construction and design, on a 1.3km stretch of the A487 toward Aberystwyth and on the edge of the Snowdonia National Park.