AN AFRICAN DREAM AND

a hankering for adventure drove Ken Muir to seek his fortune overseas. Reading Wilbur Smith novels of South Africa as a youth and with his father having worked as an engineer throughout Asia, it was a kind of natural progression.

Currently working as a project director for John Holland in Australia, Muir has a track-record of over 30 years in all forms of tunnelling and associated civil construction across nine countries and a number of challenging environments. “I grew up in Glasgow and did not leave the UK until I was 18,” says Muir. “By that time I had settled on a career as a mining engineer and had secured a place at Strathclyde University.

“However, and more importantly at that time, I had started to carve out a name as a rugby player and managed to represent Scotland at school, university and the under 21 team.

“At university I had the opportunity to work on the oil rigs in North Sea, but that did not sit well with my rugby training. Then, in my third year, I took up a vacation job with a South African mining firm and had a great three months mining gold and antimony just south of Rhodesia while also playing some good rugby.”

The adventure and camaraderie that he enjoyed on that vocational experience was what drew him back on graduation, and so he headed off to the Witwatersrand Gold Mines to start making his fortune.

“In the book Bryce Courtnay’s Power of One there are several passages that really resonate with me,” Muir explains. “Working in a 3ft 6in (1m) seam some 1,400m below the surface is not a natural environment, but fortunately I have never felt claustrophobic.

“In the gold mines, blasting time ranged between 2:30 and 4:00pm every day. Initiating the blast was relatively crude compared to today with the speed of a burning fuse used to initiate the explosives in the correct sequence. Despite some very hairy adventures, I still love, to this day, working with explosives and I have been able to indulge my habit even here in suburban Melbourne, but more of that later. “I worked at the Randfontein Estates Gold mine for three years before moving further north to Rustenburg and the platinum mines. South Africa was still under the apartheid regime and again there were a few situations, which, in glorious hindsight, could have gone horribly wrong, but it was not these misadventures that eventually burst my African dream.”

ON TO TUNNELS

The Channel Tunnel was starting up and Muir had secured a position as an engineer on the north marine drive. “This is the tunnel that takes the trains from England to France as opposed to the south marine which brings you back,” Muir says. “TBMs were new to me but the 7.9m machine soon became my second home. I worked on its laser guidance and the supply and erection of the concrete segments used to line the tunnel.

“Despite being at times only 27m below the sea bed it was never claustrophobic but there were some pretty tight spaces that you had to squeeze into to do some of trickier jobs.”

Muir adds that working in a TBM, getting in front of the cutterhead and touching the rock, is something that few people do nowadays. “The opportunity to have that exposure on a TBM made my Channel Tunnel experience so special,” he says. “The work force was predominantly Irish, although it was such a big job that all the English-speaking nations were represented. It is a testament to how small the tunnelling community is, that, on the other side of the world, several of the senior managers that I work with today, were also junior engineers on the Channel.

“To this day people are amazed that instead of recovering the TBM we buried it by driving it into the ground, concreting over the top and allowed the French machine to drive over it to complete the holing.

“It is the nature of the game that time is of the essence when tunnelling and the economics of retrieving and reusing a machine driven out to sea is often prohibitive.

“All good things come to end and on completion of the Channel I picked up a job on a hydro-electric project in the jungle of northern Malaysia.”

The Pergau Hydro was British government-funded and being built by two UK firms.

With only 10kg of hand luggage Muir arrived to take up his position as the engineer for the powerhouse complex excavation. And complex it was; access tunnels blasted from surface down to the cavern location, which was entered at four different elevations in order to excavate it as quickly as possible. The cavern was 150m long 40m high and 30m wide and there were a further two smaller caverns adjacent to it.

“What made this project unique was the temperature and pressure of the ground water,” Muir says. At 50°C and at 10 bar pressure, when water was encountered, and it was ubiquitous, life became very interesting. There were too many times when we would come out of the hole feeling like a broiled lobster.” On projects as large as Pergau, a camp is created for families, married couples and bachelor workers to live in, complete with every amenity going.

“The project, and Malaysia, was a great place to be and could fully satisfy all my adventurous cravings especially when I got a speed boat to explore the tropical islands off the east coast,” Muir says. “This was also what attracted my wife; one of only two single women on the camp where she was employed by Balfour Beatty as the head teacher for the project’s school. After a year courting we were married in her hometown of Bristol and two years later had our first daughter.

“After three years in Malaysia, when the powerhouse complex was completed I was fortunate to secure an extension to my contract by finishing the 26km-long aqueduct tunnel which tapped into smaller creeks to supply the dam’s reservoir. This kept us together in Malaysia for a total of five years.” Talking about some extreme conditions where Muir has worked in, he recalls:

“The project in Malaysia was so close to the Thailand border that every Thursday night (we had Fridays off) there was a convoy of Land Rovers heading to the Thai border to get across for the weekend.

“Anyway, we had lots of adventures on the Malaysia project; having to reverse down a winding, laterite road because a rogue elephant was chasing you is particularly memorable.”

So with a wife, a child and 10 cubic metres of possessions, Muir headed back to England where they had bought a house and was to work in the tendering office of the company. Although, working in the office was not to Muir’s liking.

“Within a year, and after the birth of our second daughter, we were off again but only as far as Ireland and the lovely town of Kilkenny,” Muir says. “I was the manager for a ventilation shaft for the Lisheen lead zinc mine. The shaft was 225m deep and 5m lined diameter and was to meet up with a tunnel being driven from surface.” This job only took two years and without another project around Muir was open to an offer from his old general superintendent from Malaysia to join him for another adventure this time in darkest Peru.

The Swedish firm Skanska was building the Yuncan hydro- electric project on the eastern slopes of the Andes. “So, with an intensive Spanish course in Guatemala, we were off to the mountains,” Muir says. “Unfortunately this project was plagued by regular spells when we would have to shut due to political unrest or financial issues. On site, the first concern was accessing the tunnel portals, which required the construction and subsequent maintenance of over 70 km of roads, no easy task when they are on the side of mountains at 3,600m a.s.l. and subject to frequent landslides. The project had an underground powerhouse cavern as well as 17km of aqueduct tunnel and for the first time I got involved in building a dam.”

Working in remote conditions attracts dangerous situations. Muir mentions the epic escape that he conducted in the high Andes of Peru.

“We had just broken through with the aqueduct tunnel when the villagers in the next valley rioted against the government,” Muir explains. “Our workforce got caught up in the disturbance but we were able to load all our people onto the train of six Hagglund muck wagons and bringing them back to safety through the new tunnel, it was a heroic escape.”

MOVE TO SPAIN

Muir spent five years on the job in Peru while exploring lots of South America and picking up a good deal of the Spanish language, so much so in fact, he was offered a job in Barcelona with Cavosa, a Spanish firm, which was the tunnelling branch of Sacyr.

“Barcelona suited us as a family,” Muir explains. “Back in Europe we were closer to aging parents and in a very civilised environment for a change. “Barcelona’s metro was undergoing a massive extension but there were delays to the start of the section I was employed on and I thought at the start that the only tunnel I would be digging was on the beach with the children. “We eventually got going with a 9.4m diameter EPBM. This type of machine can tunnel through very soft, running sands by balancing the pressure of the earth pressing in on it with the amount it extracts to build the tunnel.

“Compressed air is used as part of this process and requires workers to be trained as divers in order to work in the vicinity of the cutter head.”

One of the peculiarities of Spain, Muir clarifies, was that the authorities would not permit the tunnel workers to work in compressed air unless they were fully qualified divers so we had to contract a diving company to carry out the arduous maintenance work in the cutter head.

“The exception was for non-Spanish tunnellers who held a diving license; I fitted the bill,” he says. “It was therefore not uncommon to see the Jefe-de-Tunel complete a full shift in the cutterhead. Despite being incredibly hot, noisy, half buried in mud and in terribly cramped conditions while mauling 34kgs of recalcitrant metal it was incredibly satisfying work.”

LEAVING EUROPE

With a phonecall from Australia, Muir was again open to a move.

“I asked to come via Hong Kong so that I could see my sister and as fate would have it my new employer, John Holland, was starting a TBM in Kowloon,” Muir says. “For a couple of months, I worked on the launch of a slurry TBM, while the family swanned around China. However the start of the final school term in Australia loomed so we gave up our very transient life in HK and came to Melbourne.

“For the next five years I worked on the Northern Sewerage Project in Coburg North. It may not sound as glamorous as some of the other tunnels but it has given me the opportunity to use all my skills in shaft sinking, drill and blast and TBMs as well as picking up new skills working with road headers which will come in handy for my current role on the Melbourne Metro CBD section.

The NSP came in under budget, eight months early and it was also recognised in industry awards.

As John Holland returned to bidding and winning work South East Asia, Muir has been involved in two projects in Singapore and one tender in Malaysia.

Muir has finished another pipejacking project in Melbourne and has secured a role as project director on the CBD section of the Melbourne Metro. As Muir explains, “The change from smaller autonomous projects to this high profile, city changing, one is dramatic but at the end of the day it is still about forming groups of people, instilling in them a vision of what can be achieved and then delivering on every aspect while having fun along the way.”

Regarding the John Holland experience, Muir says that he is very happy after 11 years with them having had such a wide range of experiences. “There is no reason to move on from John Holland right now but I have said to my wife that we are always ready for another adventure in the future,” Muir adds. “That is advice that I’d like to give to any young engineer to marry a woman who has a profession that allows this kind of career. Since my wife is a school teacher she has been able to gain employment in every location we have found ourselves.” In terms of tunnelling in Australia, Muir says this country’s safety record is exemplary .

“I had mostly worked in third-world countries, so when I moved to Australia I was really impressed by the value that was placed on safety,” Muir says. “That was reassuring as I have had some truly awful experiences during my career.

With John Holland I have been involved in some very successful projects both large and small, across Australia and Internationally as well.

Talking about the actual engineering, Muir explains that it is developing all the time with the amount of planning that we put into the preparation and subsequent delivery of the project being a credit to both the tender and production teams. “We pride ourselves on the innovation and changes that we can introduce to projects that make them so successful not only for John Holland but for our clients,” he says.

Muir also talks about working practices and how they have been changed over his career. “For example the Melbourne Metro is one of the most complex projects in the world but the architectural design is just staggering,” Muir says. “Having worked in remote locations, where we had few if any stakeholders it is a real challenge to address the concerns of so many diverse groups.

“Nowadays young engineers don’t have the exposure to the extreme conditions that I had as a youth; their environment is far more controlled and safer. That’s why my stories sound so exotic to a new generation.”

Regarding his future plans, Muir says the Melbourne Metro appears to be where his current future lies but who knows what will happen next. “I love what I do, I love making holes in the ground and I would like to continue doing that,” Muir adds. “I do not want to retire in the foreseeable future. I would like to continue being at the service of the tunnelling industry. I would like to continue travelling. I still return for my annual holiday to Spain every year where I had worked on the Barcelona Metro, prior to coming to Australia.

“I have no desire to live in Scotland again. I left my home country in 1984 and have been travelling ever since. I am a proud Scot with an accent to prove it, but feel equally at home in Europe and Australia.”