Sonaspection keeps Lancaster site open, with safety measures

While many companies have closed due to COVID-19, Sonaspection, a non-destructive testing business owned by IMechE, has kept its site in Lancaster open for production staff who cannot work from home and need to be in the office for the day to day running of the business.

Sonaspection has many orders to fulfil for international projects which are continuing to operate. In the UK, the company is heavily involved with the new Hinckley Point C nuclear power station where construction work is continuing as it has been classed as an essential site by the Government.

 We spoke to Max Yates, Group Operations Manager at Sonaspection, about how they are coping and what measures they are taking to keep their staff safe.

“Initially we noticed that we were not on the list of establishments or types of industry that should be closed according to the Government guidelines. So immediately we got to work on planning for how and if we could still operate the business successfully with the safety of our staff being the most paramount of our concerns.

We are fortunate that the extension of the Sonaspection workshop is nearly complete giving us essentially twice the floorspace for working but we are still limited by facilities e.g. break room. This enabled us to return to work quite swiftly with around half the workforce and a limit being placed on the number of staff in the office at any one time and observing social distancing and other guidelines for personal safety. Another benefit is that the staff can travel in their own vehicles to and from work as opposed to London, for example, where the employees have no choice but to rely on the busy train services.

It is important that we are still able to work as Sonaspection has a lot of orders to fulfil which ship internationally with a lot of our customer base remaining open during this time. These  projects have not stopped so we need to deliver at our end to make sure they get the product they need as soon as we can. Closer to home, Sonaspection is heavily involved in the qualification of the Hinckley Point C power station. This site is classed as essential and all those involved are classed as key workers by the Government which flows down the supply chain. We have projects like this where people are relying on us to still do our part, so it is very important for us not to close our doors.

As time has moved on since the initial lockdown, we are continually looking at ways of bringing more staff back to work whilst still being able to provide the safe working conditions we have in place at the moment.”