Operator profile
Building for the future Construction specialist L Lynch goes from strength to strength, helped by FORS Gold. By John Kendall
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Providing the best possible service to our customers means investing in the safest and most efficient vehicles
ven just a few minutes spent browsing the L Lynch Plant Hire and Haulage website provides a very good first impression of the company. It offers a large and diverse range of construction services, operating with a high degree of professionalism. A wide variety of documentation can be downloaded, covering a long string of accreditations, company policy documents, as well as brochures and guides. Among the accreditations is the company’s FORS Gold certification. While plant hire and haulage are the core of the business, L Lynch’s project work has ensured that it has extended its expertise into a number of related areas. All this from a company founded 41 years ago by one man with one piece of machinery. Company founder Liam Lynch is the managing director today and still at the heart of the company’s operations. The board of directors includes his sons Rob and Merrill, extending the Lynch ‘Can Do’ attitude into another generation for the company. Those operations extend into plant hire, road haulage, heavy haulage, machine guidance and automation, telematics for clients, soil analysis and large infrastructure project work. The company finds time to campaign about safety issues too.
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DVS details
The latest safety campaign reflects the company’s concern about vulnerable road users and tipper trucks. Last October, Transport for London (TfL)
introduced the Direct Vision Standard (DVS) and safety permit for trucks operating across Greater London. Hemel Hempstead-based L Lynch undertakes project work nationwide, including across the London area. The company has campaigned on safety issues for many years and Rob Lynch has made it his personal mission to ensure that aincident-free culture is part of the company ethos. Introducing low-entry tipper cabs has been a natural extension of the health and safety campaigning. It is also one that fits well with the introduction of the DVS. The company recently took delivery of its first five Scania tippers, equipped with low-height L-series cab. The cab is one that would typically be fitted to a refuse collection or recycling vehicle. It is mounted as far forward as possible to provide as low a mounting as possible, serving two purposes. Firstly, it makes it much easier for the driver and any passengers to get into and out of the cab, because it is lower, reducing the chances of injury if the driver were to slip off a step. Secondly, it brings the driver’s eyeline down much closer to that of vulnerable road users such as cyclists, motor cyclists and pedestrians. As a result, it is easier to make visual contact in busy streets. Since higher ground clearance is needed when the vehicles are working on the rough ground of construction sites, they are all equipped with factory air suspension which allows the cab to be raised by 120mm when needed.
Scania safety spec
All five of the vehicles have been specified to achieve TfL’s five-star DVS rating. Therefore, they include Scania’s City Safe window, mounted in the passenger door of the truck and designed to enhance the safety of vulnerable road users by providing the driver with additional nearside visibility. Other safety equipment fitted to the vehicles includes left turn alarms to alert vulnerable road users at junctions and a 360° camera system and high voltage alarms to warn if the tipper body is likely to make contact with an overhead cable while
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The Standard Summer 2021
