TPA Pontoons help Ecosulis “walk on water”

Ecological consultancy Ecosulis carries its own fleet of 50 floats but turns exclusively to TPA Pontoons when it needs additional resources, as it has done for a number of projects over the years, most recently at the University of Warwick.

The projects

At the University of Warwick, TPA Pontoons were required for two weeks to help house a three-tonne excavator to remove approximately 500m³ of silt from the pond and into three newly created revetments. These new revetments, created utilising wooden posts and Nicospan, were backfilled with silt from the pond and planted out with flowering plants to improve the view from an adjacent public footpath.

Ecosulis also undertook the restoration of Vale Lake at the University of Birmingham’s Edgbaston campus, where TPA Pontoons were required for six weeks to supply enough pontoon and aluminium planks to house a three-tonne excavator, silt pump and armoured pipework to move over 13,000m³ of silt from the internal part of the lake to the newly created revetments along two sides of the lake, which when completed were planted up with 16,000 mixed marginal plants.

TPA’s relationship with Ecosulis’s actually began the year at the Environment Agency’s Attenborough Nature Reserve in Nottinghamshire, a 150-hectare complex of lakes created from gravel extraction. TPA Pontoons again provided the stable water platform for Ecosulis to provide and improve the protection for the newly created flood alleviation scheme. The provided platforms were involved in three different operations across the summer, from the installation of floating reedbeds, to the translocation of established reeds across the site, and finishing with the removal of wildfowl prevention measures protecting the planting areas when originally planted. So successful was this newly created habitat that it was colonised by bittern (one of the rarest bird species) in the UK, along with other species of wildfowl, within one season.