Ailie MacAdam on the biggest construction project in Europe
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 March 2022
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ailie's first engineering challenge was working out how to get the solids to settle in a mixture of raw sewage at a treatment plant in Stuttgart. Years later, she worked on the Boston Big Dig and realised that large-scale construction projects were her thing. A seven lane highway was rerouted underground and a bridge built using blocks of expanded polystyrene to support the on off ramps. When Bostonians complained about the vibrations from all the drilling, their beds were put on springs. She returned home to the UK to run the transformation of St Pancras Station in London, creating an international terminal for Eurostar while preserving the historic features of the original building. Preventing 690 cast iron pillars that supported the platform from 'breaking like carrots' was a particular challenge, as was keeping the Midlands mainline running. Next she took on Crossrail and was in charge of the challenging central London section, with a budget of £7.5 billion. Aware that diverse teams tend to be more successful she recruited a top team of engineers in which 30% were women.
Ailie talks to Jim about how she rose from doing experiments with sewage to become one of the most successful engineers in the UK.
Producer: Anna Buckley
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before you listen to this BBC podcast, I'd like to tell you why I love podcasting. |
| 0:04.5 | I'm Sasha Johansson, I'm an Assistant Commissioner for the BBC and I work on making podcasts. |
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| 0:40.6 | Have a listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:42.4 | Alien Macadam's first job in engineering wasn't the most glamorous. |
| 0:46.8 | She worked in a sewage treatment plant, doing experiments on, well I expect you can guess. |
| 0:52.4 | Her achievement since have been on a truly massive scale, working on some of the biggest |
| 0:57.6 | construction projects in the US and Europe and improving the daily commutes for millions |
| 1:02.9 | of people living in big cities around the world. |
| 1:05.8 | I don't know why I'm not utterly exhausted, she says, and I must say that thoughts |
| 1:10.8 | had crossed my mind too. |
| 1:13.0 | Alien caught the construction bug working on the Boston Big Dig and went on to oversee |
| 1:18.8 | the transformation of St. Pancras Station in London from a crumbling gothic building to |
| 1:24.3 | a state-of-the-art terminal for Eurostar. |
| 1:27.5 | The next challenge was Crossrail, the new East West Rail line for London that's expected |
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