Public Interest Broadcast: The Challenge

In February 2014, severe British storms washed away an 80 metre stretch of sea wall in the water of the Dawlish Coastline in Devon, UK. This left a section of the South Devon Railway track hanging in mid-air and effectively cutting off the busy train link to South West England.

Causing travel delays and cutting off some members of the public from travelling locally, Network Rail wanted the general public and residents of Dawlish to be reassured that they were doing everything in their power to fix it as soon and as safely as possible.

Fixing this coastal track wasn’t going to be easy or cheap but Network Rail are well known for their services throughout the United Kingdom and they strongly felt their duty of care to the public to get the line operational and protected from the waves in the future. To assure the public, news broadcasters and local townspeople, they asked us to supply them with time lapse cameras and site monitoring.

We did this safely and quickly; ensuring the key stakeholders at Network rail were able to access the Lobster Vision camera and use the imagery and videos for news broadcasts and their own website.

• The average time spent on the Network Rail camera's page is seven minutes, compared with their site average of 1.5 minutes.
• The page has been visited over 243,000 times - making it the second highest on the Network Rail site.
• The videos we've produced to date are the highest viewed on Network Rail's YouTube channel.

During the six-week repair period, our 24 hr coverage was used to keep the public engaged and our broadcast-ready footage was seen on national news, websites and social media channels across the country.

If you’re looking to employ site monitoring on your project whether it’s for national news or local stakeholders, why not get in touch to see what we can do for you.