Our CSR commitments: Contributing to heritage preservation and people safety

We continue our series of posts on our 15 CSR commitments, this time with a theme that remains at the heart of our activities: helping to preserve our heritage and keep people safe. 

Preserving and protecting is at the heart of our DNA

fleuve qui se jette dans la mer. Vue du ciel

We provide monitoring, engineering and consultancy expertise to infrastructure builders and owners. Our mission is to monitor the condition and behaviour of assets throughout their lifecycle to ensure the safety of their users.

At Sixense, we are also committed to the preservation of territory and cultural heritage, placing environmental issues at the heart of our development projects. We support public authorities and organisations in implementing solutions to adapt to climate change. At Sixense, we also support public and private stakeholders in implementing solutions to adapt to climate change.

 

Working every day for sustainability and safety

very day and in all our activities, we work to make infrastructures more sustainable and ensure the safety of their users. We contribute to the preservation of territories by helping to reduce demolition and reconstruction operations in favour of an approach focused on extending the life cycle of structures.

These missions are delivered through our expertise:

  • Specialised engineering to safeguard and optimise operations
  • Instrumentation and monitoring solutions for soil, assets and the environment
  • Digital business solutions to enhance the value of infrastructure and its lifecycle

 

Our actions on the ground

Devoting our expertise to climate change adaptation

Vue sur un bâtiment d'habitation (immeuble)hrough Resallience, our design office specialised in climate change adaptation, we are involved in various climate change adaptation projects and missions around the world. In France, for example, we have developed a modelling tool and consulting services to identify vulnerabilities to climate hazards in social housing. A multidisciplinary and systemic study carried out by Resallience fed into a Resilience Performance Diagnostic tool used by CDC Habitat as well as Action Logement (a French public housing organisation) to better anticipate and manage needed investments to improve the quality of life and safety of tenants. As a result, 50,000 social housing units have benefited from a Resilience Performance Diagnostic.

 

 

Securing engineering structures after natural disasters

collaborateur Sixense Monitoring travaillant dans la vallée de la Roya après la tempête de 2020At the end of 2020, Storm Alex isolated several areas, including the Upper Roya Valley in south-east France. Floods and landslides cast a tragic shadow over the region and damaged engineering assets, including a viaduct used by a regional railway for a “lifeline”, as the French national railway company calls it, connecting the Roya Valley to the city of Nice. Sixense Monitoring reacted on an emergency basis, along with rescue services, to install Cyclops motorised theodolites to ensure the safety of those repairing the viaduct and securing the structure and its surroundings while the train continued to roll over the bridge. For the first few weeks, the train was the only means of access to the upper valley other than a helicopter, and Sixense’s measurements were reviewed in real time to authorise the train’s passage.

 

Contributing to preserve cultural heritage

Collaborateur Sixense Iberia, travaillant sur la zone de la gare de Murcie en Espagne

El Carmen station, located in the city of Murcia in south-east Spain, is steeped in history. It was built in 1863. After a series of twists and turns in the project to move the station underground, the building was preserved while the Madrid-Levant high-speed line was developed to open up the region. Our employees based in Murcia are proud to have taken part in this project combining urban development and cultural heritage conservation, by installing sensors to measure and monitor the station and its infrastructure.

 

 

 

What our employees have to say

 

The OSS Saint-Louis project brought together a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Rouen in France, the Amadou Mahtar Mbow University in Senegal and a project team from the Resallience design office. Saint-Louis, a coastal city in Senegal known for its cultural heritage faces many problems related to climate change (erosion, strong swells, increased storms, flooding). We developed a model to produce vulnerability maps for local decision-makers to better understand how the area could evolve by 2100. This result was obtained by analysing and cross-referencing several data sources (topographic, cartographic, satellite or even socio-economic simulations) and by conducting field surveys with local stakeholders. The aim was to better understand their priorities, problems and risk perceptions and to integrate them into the vulnerability analysis. Philippe Sohouenou - Project Manager and Head of the Critical Infrastructures Business Line - Resallience