Farewell Chris Birse

It was an afternoon filled with laughter and a few games of bowls, with Brooke “Brookey” Pichersgill, Document Controller, Thiess Sedgeman, and Francis Villafranca, Planner Scheduler, Thiess Kentz, winning the spider crawl. A big “thank you” to all those who attended and to Steve O’Sullivan who cooked up a fantastic meal on the barbecue.

Chris is about to take a year-long trip to Europe with his fiancée Tara and focus on his ballroom dancing. We wish them both all the very best on their exciting new adventure!

HSE Coference delegates Group QA/HSE Workshop

Other workshops included developing on QA/QC Inspector Training Programme for Kentz employees, standardising HSE inspections across the Group, developing a roll-out plan for the new Risk Assessment Programme – Job Safety & Environmental Analysis (JSEA) – and IMS Poster Campaign to communicate both quality & HSE.

In addition to the workshops, two soft skills presentations on “Train the Trainer” and “Good Facilitator” were made by Dr Eric Sandelands, Corporate Learning Solutions, and Takis Karallis, Head of Group HR, respectively.

Terry Henebrey and Peter Hauptfleisch competing in the Dusi Canoe Marathon

The marathon runs from Pietermaritzburg to Durban in South Africa and is always in the latter half of January every year. It’s a 3-day event and is a unique canoeing race, as a lot of portaging (carrying boats) is done, especially on Day 1. Up to 20 km can be run after adding up all the portages, most of which are compulsory and a few of which are optional, giving good runners an advantage at times, depending on the river levels.

Being a K2 (doubles) year, approximately 1,000 K2 boats and over 2,000 paddlers competed. Of the 1,000 boats that entered, 877 completed the race. It was Terry’s 6th time completing the marathon.

Terry and Peter finished 605th overall and 110th in the sub-veteran category. Their overall time was 13hrs 46mins, with a personal best on Day 1 of 4hrs 46mins being achieved. The race was completed with only one swim in the three days on the Dusi River.

Players from Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi offices with RTÉ commentator Marty Morrissey enjoying the games

Dubai GAA Games

There was a large Kentz representation at the Dubai Duty Free GAA Games held in Dubai on 25th-26th January. The GAA games were part of the Dubai Irish Festival Week, where a large number of activities such as a golf outing, a race night and a comedy night were held, and traditional Irish music was played every night in bars all around Dubai.

The football consisted of a 7-a-side tournament, including participants from a large number of Irish Senior Club teams who had travelled from Ireland for the occasion. This format demanded high fitness levels as well as good footballing skills. Kentz employees from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi played in the tournament.

The Saudi Arabian Team, who had won the previous Bahrain 11-a-side tournament, found it difficult to adapt to the 7-man game and got to the Plate semi-finals. They were beaten by eventual Plate winners Qatar. A number of Kentz men contributed to the Qatar victory. Congratulations to the Qatar team.

Employee Referrals
Congratulations to Apolonio Lulu, Mechanical Project Engineer, Kentz (Saudi Arabia), who recently received a US$1,000 reward for referring two new people to the company for the posts of QA/QC Inspectors.