About – Vibrotrim

About Vibrotrim

Passionate about improving safety in the port environment

The DB1 Vibrotrim is the brainchild of Darren Bemrose, who has worked in the ports industry for over 20 years and runs a ship discharge operation Westfield Plant and Management from the busy UK port of Immingham.

Darren is passionate about port safety and pioneered the ‘Westfield Way’ which swapped out men and skid steers for excavators, utilising the benefits of excavator design and the safety aspects of the operator being with the ‘safe zone’ of the excavator cabin.

One problem remained, however, a ship’s hull is not smooth and flat and structures such as ladders, pipe casings and the ribs of the hull caused deposits to gather. These deposit could not be reached by the bucket of the excavator so it was left to manual workers to dislodge the loose cargo with long handled scrapers.

This archaic and dangerous practice put men at risk and significantly slowed down the operation. That is when the concept of the Vibrotrim came into being.

If the manual workers could be taken out of the equation, it would reduce risk and also improve the efficiency of the discharge process.

Patented technology

By starting with a blank sheet of paper, the Vibrotrim could be designed to match every requirement of this process

Be operated by the excavator operator
Could permanently fixed to the arm so no need for time consuming swapping of attachments
Would not impeded the use of the bucket
Would easily dislodge the residue cargo without damaging the structures or ship’s hull

Darren Bemrose

Experienced in the discharge of dry bulk cargo

Westfield have been operating in Immingham Docks since 1983, trimming ships and handling bulk materials.

In 2000, Scan-Mech Plant Ltd, a specialist Volvo Plant and equipment dealer bought the company and bought a larger fleet of machines of shovels and excavators. Around the same time, the state-of-the-art Humber International Terminal (HIT) was opened and our partnership with ABP, Britain’s biggest port by tonnage, was formed. A partnership that handles more materials than any other port in the UK.

Westfield, and Darren Bemrose, have also been key players in the development of port safety through the Port Skills Safety guidance groups and Darren is author and co-author of Safety in ports documents and the L148 Safety in Docks HSE guidance.