BOB IBELL | INTERVIEW
e met at consultancy LBA’s offices on Borough High Street, on the south bank of the river in Central London,
round the corner – not unexpectedly – from London Bridge station. (We shall come to why it is there later.) Bob Ibell is a happily talkative man, full of anecdote, and clearly equally full of passion and enthusiasm for engineering and tunnelling. What got him into it? “I’m not quite sure,” he says. “I didn’t want
to be office bound. I wanted to be out, and doing something positive, something useful. Both my parents were teachers – my father was a headmaster – and they both worked hard, so I had that from an early age. When I was debating my future, my father said, ‘I tell you what, come along and talk to the Borough Engineer and then you can decide whether you want to do that sort of job.’ So that is what got me going along the path.” It wasn’t quite straightforward: “I messed
up my ‘A’ levels, so I nearly ended up as a Quantity Surveyor. But at the last minute I got accepted into Aberdeen University, to do Civil Engineering. “I didn’t stay for an Honours, (in Scottish
Universities that is a 4-year course) because I was keen to get to work and Taylor Woodrow offered me a job. Nothing to do with tunnelling, mind you. The underground was not really mentioned on my university course. “So I started with Taylor Woodrow and
that was great. I was attached to Wylfa nuclear power station, on Anglesey in North Wales, which was being constructed at the time, but the first job I did was building a hardcore road to take the big oil-cooled cables down from Trawsfynydd nuclear power station to Porthmadog under the Glaslyn estuary and then up to a substation at Pentir near Bangor. That was a wonderful introduction and taught me so much straight away. “There, I learned how things work. In
particular, I learned that nothing quite happens to plan, and that you have to be aware of that and have the contingencies in hand to be sure of things happening. “At Wylfa I remember almost indelibly
the safety part of it. I was involved in pre- stressing the nuclear vessel there. Pre-stress was provided by big 36-strand tendons using a specially-designed anchor block. Strands were retained by collets, which were essentially circular wedges. “We were putting a lot of pre-stress on them, and it happened on occasion that
you’d hear a little ‘Ping!’ which meant that something had snapped. It might have been just one wire in a strand, but this was nuclear so the whole strand had to come out, and to do that you had to de-stress it. You had to do that with great care because you first had to take it over stress to release the collets and the danger was the whole strand would snap in which case the collets would become very fast and very big bullets. If that sounds unduly dangerous today, back then we just thought of it as normal and took appropriate precautions. It was how things were done.” He got his first bit of underground work
sinking a shaft at Hartlepool, again at a nuclear power station, to link up with the outfall tunnel, and then more doing Central station at Heathrow airport. “From Heathrow I went up to the
tunnels in Gateshead, on the Tyne and Wear Metro. The contracts manager was Maurice Gooderham, and the Agent was Dai Haycock. When I got there Dai said ‘Don’t think you’re going to do that bit and I’m going to do this bit. We are one team so if I’m not here you’re in charge.’ I said, ‘Oh. I see. But I don’t know much about tunnelling.’ He said, ‘Well, we’d better teach you.’ So we used to sit down at lunchtime and as we ate our sandwiches, Dai would be explaining tunnelling to me on his whiteboard, and instructing me in the golden rules. ‘This is how you’d approach this problem, and this is how this works, and this is what this term means...’ So that’s how I learned about tunnelling – from Dai and his whiteboard over sandwiches.
“That job was characterised by the
ground. The south side of the river was all coal measures, so underground we had to work in flameproof conditions. The coal seams outcrop on the side of the Tyne there, and a lot of them had been worked because in the past, although it was illegal; people just dug out coal for their winter fuel. So it was quite difficult ground, quite broken, and punctuated by weak seams. We put a quite staggering amount of grout to try to deal with it, something like 130,000 tonnes of it. “And you didn’t put too much pressure
on because you never knew where the grout was going to come out. It would start springing up through the seams all over the place. I remember there was one garden where you just saw the tops of the Brussels sprouts poking up over our grout. But these things happen (we of course made sure that everything was properly restored) and that was my real introduction to tunnelling. It got me understanding the fundamentals, although I never really started at the bottom. To this day, I think that’s a bit of a shame and I rather regret it.” Engineering and delivering projects,
he says, is mainly a matter of people. And that was demonstrated on the Isle of Sheppey. “It was a coastal protection job, and it
had got into trouble. A kilometre and a half of clay beach cliff was deteriorating, and the beach was being washed away. The company decided to change the whole senior team and I went there as project manager.
Left: Bob catches a fine trout from Wimbleball Reservoir, Exmoor National Park Above: Bob at Warwick with the MSc Class of 2013 and BTS senior representatives
November 2023 | 39
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49
