Mining truck team show their appreciation for NHS workers

STAFF at a Northumberland surface mine paid tribute to the NHS in a super-sized way.

The team at Banks Mining’s Shotton surface mine, near Cramlington, lined up around 30 vehicles from their plant fleet to spell out the name of the NHS as part of the weekly appreciation of the work that doctors, nurses and other healthcare and ancillary staff are doing to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic. The tribute covered an area of more than 4,200 square metres, while the combined weight of all the vehicles used to make the letters, which included off-highway dump trucks, tipper trucks and trailers, topped 2,000 metric tonnes. The tribute was the idea of Neil Cook, manager at the Shotton site, whose wife Heather works for the NHS. He said: “I’d seen a few different tributes in industrial locations around the UK and thought it would be good for us to do something as well, so came up with the idea of using our fleet of vehicles to spell out the name of the NHS. After doing a scale drawing to make sure we had all the vehicles that we needed, we talked to the drivers about what we had planned and they got everything in place within just 20 minutes.”

The Shotton site is less than two miles from the Northumbria Specialist Emergency Care Hospital in Cramlington.

Jeannie Raine, community relations manager at the Banks Group, added: “Like everyone, we’re in awe of the work being done by every part of the NHS to tackle the coronavirus and organising this tribute was our Shotton team’s rather unusual way of joining in with the national thank you.”