ALASTAIR BIGGART | INTERVIEW
“In 1995, at the end of my time on
Storebælt, I returned to Mott MacDonald and went out to California as Project Manager in charge of Construction Management on the $1.5 billion Metro Red Line North Hollywood Project in Los Angeles. This project included 10 km of twin railway tunnels, three underground stations and all the railway systems. Control of groundwater was a particular problem. TBMs and blasting were both used for underground excavation. Part of the tunnel was under Hollywood Boulevard. Our first task was to raise the Gold Stars on the sidewalk. I stayed on this project for four years, after which I joined Mott MacDonald’s office in California for a further two years.” In 2002, Biggart set up on his own as a
consultant. “I swapped a hard hat for a desk. The challenges are totally different. I could do a lot of it from my desk, but of course you have to visit the projects. And it is different being a consultant because you are watching and trying to remember the whole time, especially if you’ve been a contractor. If you try and give advice too much they charge you for your interference. If you start to advise them how to do it, they will say; ‘Well you told us to do that!’ But I enjoyed the change. “I found that even though I was consulting
I was learning a lot at the same time. Which is a thing that always happens: if you act as a consultant to people, you learn from their mistakes. And if you are lucky they don’t blame you for those mistakes. “Being a consultant you have to know
the technology as well as management techniques. You cannot manage something if you don’t know the technology. When you start to give advice you have to know a lot about all the details of the subject. Happily, over my career although I have been on the whole managing the projects, I have always taken a great interest in the technology. “So, for instance, one of the projects I
worked on as a consultant was the Saint Clair River Tunnel in Canada/USA. I and one or two other people were called in as a small team. One of them, Les Hampson, is a superb tribologist who knows everything there is to know about the theory of moving surfaces and is therefore very expert on seals and in particular TBM main bearing seals. “The TBM was 9 meters diameter, which
was the biggest closed face TBM that had been used in the USA and Canada at that time, and the company had been used to making much smaller machines. They
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