You Float Our Boat: Why Now is the Time to Hire Pontoons and Floating Plant
- Greenplant
- 21 hours ago
- 2 min read
After months of drought and extreme heat, what's on most people's minds is the lack of water. But for contractors, now is the time to look ahead to flood season and get waterfront work done to provide defences, including dredging, piling, bank reinforcement and shore stabilisation. The low water levels, whilst deeply concerning, provide a small benefit in making water-based construction work easier by increasing bank exposure. According to The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, every £1 invested in flood defence prevents around £8 in economic damage, so now is the time to get cracking if you want a more-efficient-than-average construction programme with maximum return on investment.
Greenplant started company life as the exclusive plant and equipment supplier to riparian contracting specialists, so floating plant equipment is a core part of our inventory. If you're working on or near a body of water, here's how floating plant can make your job easier and safer.
Heavy Machinery Support on Water
Pontoons or "floating docks" transform aquatic environments into stable, secure construction sites. They can support large cranes to lift heavy bridge beams or drive piles. Excavators can be mounted directly onto pontoons to perform dredging or shoreline reinforcement. Marine drilling rigs can be positioned on pontoons for drilling underwater foundations.
Pontoons can be configured in various ways to provide the required safe working load (SWL) for your project. For example, a 6 pontoon configuration can achieve an SWL of 18 tonnes. Please speak to one of our friendly team for advice. Our pontoons are NATO specification, making them stable and robust enough to manage heavy plant equipment.
Material & Equipment Transport
Pontoons connect to form temporary bridges for trucks and heavy vehicles. Workers can load excavated mud, rocks and debris onto pontoons or skip boats for disposal. Pontoons and skip boats can also act as supply barges to facilitate transportation of concrete, steel columns, tarmac, timber or other materials across rivers or lakes.
Structural Access & Maintenance
Safe inspection of low-clearing bridge underbellies is best achieved with mobile pontoons or skip boats as a stable platform. They also provide a base to build marinas, piers, docks and boardwalks. You can build scaffolding onto floating plant to paint, blast or repair marine structures.
Utility & Pipeline Installation
You can use floating plant to hold spooling equipment when you're laying underwater electrical and fibre-optic cables, or to precisely position, weld, and submerge water or sewage pipelines.
Whatever floating plant you need to hire, our teams are ready to help. Get ahead of flood season with hand-picked equipment by riparian specialists, backed by Greenplant's legendary 5-star service.
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