Balfour Beatty Engineering Services, Scotland West office has been awarded the mechanical and electrical services contract for Strathclyde Fire and Rescue’s new training facility, which is being constructed in Glasgow.

The new base at Cambuslang will bring training together on one site, including a 5000sq m, two-storey academic building with classrooms, lecture rooms, an auditorium and incident management training rooms.

The ‘hub of excellence’ training centre will cover 30 acres and will include:

* A residential zone with tenement buildings, houses and a tower block.

* An industrial zone with lock-ups, a petro-chemical plant, and a fire behaviour unit where firefighters will be trained to deal with flash-overs and other forms of fire behaviour.

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* Transport zone with road network, 80-metre stretch of motorway and railway track, tunnel, level crossing and platform.

An academic zone will be a self-contained building where firefighters and support staff will receive training. This building will contain conference, training and classrooms and also a library and is designed and sited to make the most of natural light and ventilation.

Other "green" features of the training centre will include a wind turbine and a biomass boiler. All toilets will be flushed with rainwater collected on site.

Fire chief’s say the facility will be the most advanced of its kind in the UK and will offer specialised training for every modern emergency, including rail and road crashes, building explosions, and blazes in high-rise buildings.

BBES envisage maximising off-site manufacture through a series of workshops to ensure sectional programme delivery dates are achieved. Innovation and engineered solutions will be orientated around improving the installation times in meeting the client’s milestones.

Gary Crossan is managing BBES’ operations on site, supported by Tim Atkin, Kevin McCann and the team. Works started on site in November and will be completed at the end of 2011. Bovis Lend Lease is our client, and we are supported by consulting engineers Hulley and Kirkwood.

(GK)