INTERVIEW | BOB IBELL


systems; we are going to have cross


passages. How many cross passages? How many piston ducts?’ “Our submission was successful, although


our Chairman Sir Nicholas Henderson, who had been British Ambassador to Paris, did, at the last minute, have to write into our proposals a clause that in so many years’ time people would look at it again to see if a road tunnel could be built as well. I think that today you could indeed build one. You could probably build it faster and you could probably build it as an add-on. But given that the current one isn’t really making any money, why would you? “So, anyway, I was there right at the


start trying to get the thing away.” CTG had won the concession and set up a client organisation, which was to develop into Eurotunnel Group. For construction, TransManche Link (TML) was created as an Anglo-French consortium of contractors, formed of UK’s Translink Contractors and France’s Transmanche Construction. “The first thing that developed was that


we were building different tunnels. The French were to an extent coloured by their view of the ground. On their side it is very broken compared with the UK side. We’ve got chalk marl, nice and clayey; they’ve got broken white chalk. It did take two or three weeks, at what turned out to be quite a crucial time, and quite a bit of work to get to the point of actually agreeing. “It became quite comical, really. I


remember sitting down with one of their chief engineers to agree what diameter the tunnel was going to be.” He recalls the


arguments about having extra cooling in the tunnel. “We believed we would need it,” he says, while the French engineers produced “extensive calculations” to say there would be sufficient groundwater inflows into the finished tunnel to take away all the heat generated by trains moving masses of air. “To be fair, the French side of the tunnel was a lot wetter, which may have influenced their thinking,” he says. “I remember going to this meeting where


they produced lots and lots of figures to prove their case.” But, as a very clever man from MHA said, an enormous amount of energy will be expended to drive a train undersea for 40km, to end up at the same level – or amount of potential energy – as before. Where has the heat gone? “So we agreed we might need cooling,” he adds. “And that opens one’s eyes to what is


actually an important lesson: to always think, firstly, about the fundamentals of an argument. Because it is possible in engineering to produce a marvellous calculation that show what you want it to show but that basic physics will tell you is wrong. “As the project went forward it obviously


expanded. I had a number of roles over my six years on the project. One of my jobs was to try to coordinate the French and the UK ends, in as much as they needed coordinating, but also to make sure that the design information was flowing from the design office to the right part of the construction at the right time. We had about 5,000 people by then, so it really was a major job.


“Another of my jobs was fire and


emergency response. We were building the service tunnel, which was going to be a 22km-long blind heading, and we needed to convince HSE that it could be done safely. It was a big ask. Douglas Parks produced a quantitative risk assessment and we introduced many more safety measures onto the TBM. We didn’t have water curtains, but we did have fire suppression systems, and it was a big problem trying to maintain them in a sea salt environment. “And the other thing we did, and which


the HSE congratulated on, was that we drafted an emergency response manual. The idea was that if we had an emergency, we had to have a set-up that would enable us, from one point at Shakespeare Cliff, to know what was happening underground and maybe 22km away, so that we could tell the Fire Brigade what was happening. We brought all the monitoring together into one central point, we called it the communications centre rather than a control centre because it didn’t actually control anything. “And there were real issues here because


the Kent Fire Brigade had a statutory responsibility to respond to any emergency, but they were not equipped for underground fires. So they were almost obliged to say to us – No, you cannot do that work down that tunnel. In the end we got round it, by establishing a trained experienced dedicated emergency-response rescue squad of ex-miners. Rescue vehicles were equipped with breathing apparatus – which was a first. The arrangement with


Above left: LBA sailing team, Little Britain 2016 event, at Cowes: Mark Reiss, Martin Knights, Stuart Westgate, Frank Ellis , Symon Wilson, John Keys, Rob Naybour, and Bob Above right: Bob Ibell has had a long, varied and successful career in tunnelling, including a number of landmark UK projects 42 | November 2023


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