Question: Do vibrations have effect on specific animals and how?

Natalie Wride answered on 13 Jun 2016:

Hi BrightSpark 🙂

You’re asking some fab questions – looks like you’re well on the way to becoming an Engineer already! This is a really important question, whilst we need to have good roads and rail for travel, we don’t want to harm the environment. I don’t think anyone wants to look out of the window on the train and see no green because we’ve destroyed all our grassland and wildlife.

The vibrations will affect all animals the same way they would affect us too if we were there. It’s especially important for animals like badgers, rabbits and other burrowing animals that dig holes – we wouldn’t want them digging holes beneath the railway tracks both for their safety and our own! So when we build train lines like this where there’s going to be lots of vibrations, we first have to assess what wildlife is on the site.

The best solution to protecting wildlife is to try and avoid construction in this area but when this cannot happen we have to look at solutions that minimise the effects on wildlife, particularly if there are protected species. There are lots of things we can do:

If the construction might destroy wildlife habitats, we make sure to build another habitat for them. So we might leave a patch of land with wildflowers that will encourage wildlife to move there or a reed bed for frogs and newts.
If there are nesting birds or badgers and other animals near the construction then we can’t build there. This might only be for a couple of months when birds are building their nests and their eggs are hatching. Once the season is finished then there is an inspection to make sure it is ok to build there. We also have things like newt and frog boxes which mean that we can catch them and move them to a new habitat to stop them getting hurt on the construction site.
We also sometimes build little tunnels beneath things like roads and railways (you might have seen them when you’re driving in the car!) that mean badgers, foxes, rabbits and hedgehogs can pass beneath the road like they did before it was built and tries to make sure they are not hit by any cars.

Sorry it’s a bit of an essay but I hope this answers your question! There’s lots of things we can do to try and protect the wildlife from vibrations and construction. If we do this during construction then when the trains are running, the wildlife should be safe from the vibrations 🙂