ALASTAIR BIGGART | INTERVIEW
Alastair’s early career underground saw him working on tunnels in London, including the Victoria Line, where there was (Above left) cast iron lining, (Above right) experimental length of precast concrete lining, and (Left) experiments with shields - McAlpine Centre Shaft Digger and Kinnear Moodie Drum Digger
had three different drive motors. All three had to go wrong before it stopped so that was fairly safe. And we had two deep shafts right down to the bottom which were about 120 metres deep, and that took the men in and out. At the peak of the project we were taking in 800 men per shift, and there were three shifts, so that was two and a half thousand men per 24 hours. And all of that worked pretty smoothly. “And we had a great cooperation with
the French. It was wonderful. They are good engineers. The one big difference was their attitude to drink and smoking. Doing either underground was a sackable offence on the UK side; they allowed both. “I was promoted to Operations Director in
1989, looking after strategic planning for the tunnels and terminal in the UK. I was put in charge of the complex interfaces between
civil construction and the installation of all the fixed equipment, and of the major construction interface between England and France. “When all the tunnelling was finished on
the Channel Tunnel, I joined Mott MacDonald and for the first time in my career became a consultant and therefore, you might also say, a gentleman. I was appointed as Tunnel Manager for the Storebælt Eastern Railway Tunnel in Denmark; after the first 6 months I became Project Director working directly for the Danish owner. “Storebælt is a rather remarkable tunnel
that outsiders will not know much about. It is not as iconic as the Channel Tunnel of course, but its construction was seen as the most geologically difficult going on in the world at the time. “Zealand is the main island of Denmark
and has about half the total population of Denmark. The other half of the population is in Jutland on the mainland and, before the tunnel, they had ferries connecting them. The project involved 8km of twin 7.7m-diameter rail tunnels beneath the waterway, and as well as that a very large suspension bridge. The whole project was 18 kilometres long. The bridge had a main span of 1.6 kilometres and was going to be the longest in the world - but the Japanese built a bridge of their own at the same time and just got ahead of us, as their main span was 1.9 km. “Four large-diameter EPBMs did the
excavating. Hydrostatic pressures as high as 7.5 bar had to be controlled during tunnelling. “On Storebælt, in June 1994, we had a very serious underground fire. I am pretty
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