It’s time for an icebreaker

ALL 288 STAY cables on The Queensferry Crossing will be cleaned over the next three months, to mitigate “ice accretion”

The decision to clean the cables on all three towers was made after laboratory tests at the Jules Verne Climatic Wind Tunnel in France showed that cleaning the cables meant that it took longer for wet snow to stick to the high density polyethylene stay pipes around the cables.

Rope access technicians abseiled from the north tower to clean the cables by hand to test the theory.

Now a machine has been trialled that can be winched up the cables to jet-wash them remotely.