MIKE MCCONNELL | INTERVIEW


programme was ‘clear mines’. This was not something that my engineering training had especially equipped me for. It was fortunate that there was a UK Army base close by, whose engineers kindly removed the mines, otherwise we would never have started! “I was still with Balfour Beatty and


Above: Mike presents a copy of the BTS 50th anniversary book to Stephen Gilmore, Principal at his old school – Bangor Grammar School, in N Ireland


“This was a conventional drill and blast


tunnel. Excavation by roadheader had been considered but the problem was that the ground was very hard boulders that were embedded in a very weak tuff rock – so weak, in fact, that you could almost crush it with your fingers. I really enjoyed the scale of the project: it had 10m-diameter tunnels and 16 million cubic metres of earth and rock works and 250,000 cubic metres of concrete. I had a Chief Engineer’s role up to the river diversion. “It was also ideal for our two children,


who were to receive their education on the expatriate camp, with UK teachers also living on the same camp. On our days off on Sundays, we would arrange for trails of paper through the jungle as Hash House Harriers, which is an international social group that meets for non-competitive runs with a beer of two afterwards. This was an excellent opportunity for Swedes and Brits to mix socially, with the children. It was a privilege to work with skilled and experienced tunnel supervisors such as Herb Hart and construction manager Henk Van Es. Our children also enjoyed mixing with other nationalities at the school. “My proudest time was working with


Herb on the steel-lined power tunnel. We increased the length of steel can to 18m. That maximised prefab work in the workshop, minimised the number of tunnel concrete pours and reduced the overall tunnel activity by three months. As a result we able to hold to the overall watering-up date.


“After our two-year contract we moved


as a family to Oman, for a major 6.6 million cubic metre rock blasting exercise to build a road up a rock escarpment that is 1km high. This was quite a contrast.


WHAT I ENJOYED WAS


BEING AT THE COALFACE, SO THAT IS WHAT I STUCK TO. MIKE BECAME FICE IN 1995


We were living in portacabins in the desert. Fortunately, this was only for a year. There had been conflicts there in the 1970s and the first item on our contract


enjoying life as a civil engineer. I was specialising in hydroelectric schemes, which are a mixture of most things but always involve tunnels of some description. Of course, there are dams, power stations, spillways and infrastructure, like roads and power lines and so on; a hydro scheme involves every aspect of civil engineering, and that is what I liked. As well as that, it produces electricity for communities and is reasonably green. “Even in those days – this was the 1980s –


people were beginning to think green. A lot of these plants were producing 250 megawatts and more, which is a very significant input into the grid, and a lot of them were linked up with government funding, frequently from the UK Government” (both the Swedish and the British governments were subsidising the Java project). “But, of course, that could not last.


The UK Government did not have an everlasting potful of money for such things. There were about two decades when such projects were happening and they were a bit of a ‘magical era’ in that side of tunnelling. That era of tunnelling is reflected upon


in the BTS book Tunnelling Tales – 50 years of celebrations for the British Tunnelling Society. Mike discusses this later.


Above: A schematic drawing of the underground complex planned at Pergau Hydroelectric Project, in Malaysia, showing the Powerhouse and Transformer caverns, headrace and tailrace tunnels, surge and access tunnels, and more.


August 2026 | 37


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