GUEST DETAILS
Aidan Madden is a Chartered Civil/Structural Engineer with over twenty years' experience at global firm Arup, leading complex, impactful projects worldwide. Following the catastrophic Rana Plaza collapse in 2013, Aidan became a pivotal member of Arup's leadership team developing and implementing structural safety assessment methodology for the original Bangladesh Accord. This monumental effort required creating standardised yet highly rigorous technical frameworks to rapidly assess structural integrity of over 2,500 garment factories—demanding first-principles engineering judgement at unprecedented speed and scale. His work proved instrumental in identifying and remediating high-risk structural, electrical and fire hazards, effectively codifying ethical engineering practice for an entire global industry. For his extraordinary contribution to safety and social responsibility through engineering, Aidan received the prestigious Engineers Ireland International Engineer of the Year Award.
Connect with Aidan on LinkedIn

Colm Quinn is Head of Operations for the International Accord, a legally binding agreement focused on securing safe and healthy garment and textile industries worldwide. Leading implementation and operational rollout of Accord programmes across multiple countries including Pakistan expansion, Colm manages technical capacity-building initiatives training local engineers—structural, fire and electrical specialists—on rigorous safety standards necessary for factory inspections and remediation. Bringing strong high-level engineering foundations from previous work as Associate at global engineering firm Arup, Colm's career trajectory represents the crucial shift from developing pioneering safety frameworks to successfully scaling and sustaining them across global industries. His operational leadership ensures that technical rigour developed in Bangladesh translates effectively to new markets whilst empowering local engineering teams.
Connect with Colm on LinkedIn
 

MORE INFORMATION
Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/   

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES
"The fundamental problem was that a building which was designed to be a five story building, and by the time it collapsed in April of 2013 it was a nine storey building. So it had been overdeveloped. They had put on additional floors beyond what it had been designed for. You have a building which is heavier than it's supposed to be, and with concrete which is weaker than it should have been." - Aidan Madden

"There's kind of a bit of an art and a bit of science to this. We need to spend the time that we need to do the assessment, but we have to be able to do it at scale. A colleague of mine had a great phrase which we reused today: optimal ignorance. It's like, what do you really, really need to know to allow you to define the actions, to define the meaningful things that will happen after your visit to make those buildings safer." - Aidan Madden

"The programme is quite unique in that it's dealing with existing buildings. There's no code that I know where existing buildings are front and foremost. This is a problem not just in Asia. Engineers need to be retrained or refocused to deal with existing buildings. It's not a Bangladesh problem. It's not a Pakistan problem, it's an engineering problem" - Colm Quinn

"The Accord, combined with the RSC in Bangladesh, inspected over 2,000 factories and have identified over 140,000 individual health and safety findings, and of those, over 115,000 have been corrected." - Colm Quinn

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience here is an AI transcription 
Dusty Rhodes  0:03  
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes, and welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast.

Colm Quinn  0:08  
We worked with Arup to get our engineers in that mindset of dealing with existing buildings. It's not a Bangladesh problem. It's not a Pakistan problem, it's an engineering problem.

Dusty Rhodes  0:22  
Today we're chatting with two Irish engineers highly involved in literally redefining worker safety standards in the aftermath of one of the deadliest industrial disasters in modern times. They are a former Engineers Ireland Engineer of the Year, Aidan Madden from Arup, and Chartered Engineer and former Arup Associate who is now Head of Operations for the International Accord, Colm Quinn. Aidan and Colm, you're both very welcome. 

Aidan Madden  0:48  
Thanks to be here. Thank you.

Dusty Rhodes  0:50  
So Listen, guys. Our story today is quite a dramatic one. It stems from one of the deadliest industrial disasters in recent times, which happened 1000s of miles away from Ireland, but it's one in which you've both been intimately involved with in your careers. It happened at the Rana Plaza factory building in Dhaka in Bangladesh. Aidan, maybe, can you tell me, from a structural engineer's perspective, what was the fundamental problem with that building?

Aidan Madden  1:19  
Yeah, thanks, Dusty. So I suppose the fundamental problem there was that was a building which was designed to be a five story building, and by the time it collapsed in April of 2013 it was a nine story building. So in other words, it had been over developed. They had put on additional floors beyond what it had been designed for. And while I wouldn't be aware of the specifics, what I do know for a fact since then is that things like the concrete quality in Bangladesh at that time had been very poor. So you have a building which is heavier than it's supposed to be, and with concrete which is weaker than it should have been. And those two things together, at least, were significant players in the collapse that happened in back in 2013

Dusty Rhodes  2:10  
And I imagine that within the building, like a lot of buildings in Asia, tends to have retail on the ground, or the first two, three floors, and then you've got, like apartment buildings. If this place was a factory, I would imagine a lot of heavy equipment in the higher floors as well. Yeah, yeah,

Aidan Madden  2:26  
Yeah. The I suppose the garment factories, by their nature, you know, they are manufacturing industrial facilities. So in some cases, they will have heavy equipment throughout, distributed throughout the buildings. You know, they're producing large volumes of clothes for all of us, so they store quantities of raw materials and finished products. So there's a lot of storage, there's machinery, there's people, all of that contributes to the loads that the building experiences.

Dusty Rhodes  2:56  
So Aidan, then what happened the building? 

Aidan Madden  2:58  
So the building, it collapsed. And I suppose what we know from from reading reports at the time is that in the days leading up to that collapse, there were reports of, I suppose, some distress in the concrete structure that people had noticed and how that was acted on, I suppose, is a bit unclear. But ultimately, people were still working in that factory when it collapsed on the, I think it was the 24th of April, and unfortunately, you know, and tragically, that led to the loss of over 1200 lives, and that, I suppose, created the necessity for action

Dusty Rhodes  3:34  
exactly, all right, it was a huge international story, and it was a very, very long way away. How did you get involved in this ape? So

Aidan Madden  3:43  
from Arup perspective, we had actually been working, I suppose, a major client of ours from Spain, or an organization called Inditex, a garment brand. We had been working with them in Bangladesh in the previous year or so, helping them with some fire safety assessments and factories because they were concerned about fire safety issues in factories in Bangladesh. So once we're on a plaza happened, they turned to us and they asked us for our support to help them figure out how they were going to deal with this, this tragedy. And you know, how could they do something about that? So they asked us to figure out a way of starting to assess the factories in which they were sourcing garments from to understand, were there other Rana plazas out there, what was the physical state, the physical condition, the quality, the condition of the factories within which their products were being made? So we spent some time, you know, in that period, immediately after Rana Plaza, in the kind of the summer of 2013 we had a team from Dublin, Madrid, London, some other colleagues who got together to start to think about, how do you do something that's meaningful, but how do you create an inspection methodology which will provide some meaningful information? I. Quickly. And so what we have is we were trying to create a balance between going too deep, you know, and doing a very detailed analysis on each factory, versus doing something that was so light touch that it actually didn't provide any useful information. And so it was really this balance between getting meaningful, actionable information about things like fundamental decisions. Can this building remain in operation? Is it safe for this building to remain in operation? If so, what are the actions that need to be addressed? Do they, you know, what's the timeline within those actions need to be addressed? That was what we grappled with in those very early days back in 2013 and that led us, I suppose, to move on then to piloting that on the ground and then actually rolling that out, implementing that in the factories. 

Dusty Rhodes  5:50  
So tell me about the checks. I mean, how do you check? I mean, we're used to building checks, but how do you handle checking 1000s of buildings and checking them quickly.

Aidan Madden  6:00  
There's kind of a bit of an art and a bit of science, I guess, to some of this, and what we have to do is to try and combine both. And I think what you've what you've touched on there, is critical. Here is the scale of this. There are 1000s of buildings in Bangladesh, which is where we started, and 1000s of buildings, 10s of 1000s elsewhere in the world where these products are made. We need to spend the time that we need to do the assessment, but we have to be able to do it at scale, and that's the critical thing. So our approach was, I suppose, taking people who are trained in assessing existing buildings, providing them with some context specific information. So what's the Bangladeshi context? How are buildings built in Bangladesh in that time, what are the materials they're made out of? How can we quickly check that those materials are what they're supposed to be, comparing design drawings versus what's actually built and then doing some very I suppose, finding what do we determine to be like the critical life safety issues in a building, and then checking those specifically so in a Bangladeshi context, where we had these kind of multi-story factory buildings made out of reinforced concrete, generally, as I mentioned, sometimes with the poor concrete quality, we were very both interested in things which could fail brittley. So in other words, give you no warning. And so those were the things we were really focused on. So concrete columns became a really important checking concrete columns with enough science, enough engineering behind us, so we could, we could define kind of minimum levels of safety. And that became kind of the methodology. It was really been super focused on the critical life safety elements. And, you know, a colleague of mine had a great phrase, which we reused today, which is kind of optimal ignorance. It's like, what do you really, really need to know to allow you to define the actions, to define the meaningful things that will happen after your visit, to make those buildings safer. So that was our approach.

Dusty Rhodes  8:04  
Colm, while all this was going on, there was something going on up on a policy level, I suppose, where people were saying, we need to have some kind of an organization in place which is going to make sure that accidents like this do not happen again in the future. And international accord was born, who established and what's the purpose of it?

Colm Quinn  8:23  
The purpose, in my mind, is quite simple. It's to address life safety issues in in the supply chain, in garment factories. Really, really simple, and Aiden's touched on them, some of those life safety issues, the scope is broader now than than initially. So there was work in the background, kind of not so public, on establishing a program pre Rana Plaza. And the tragedy of Rana Plaza really kick started the Bangladesh accord, as it was at the time, and the program started from there.

Dusty Rhodes  8:54  
So tell me about the Accord today, then, because you're joining us from Pakistan, what is it you're doing? 

Colm Quinn  8:59  
So today, the Accord is based on Amsterdam, the International accord, and we are operating in Pakistan at the moment. That's our country specific safety program, as we call it. The work in Bangladesh continues that was taken over by an organization called the RSC. So it was in transition in 2020 from the Bangladesh accord to the RSC, and they fulfill the obligations of the brands in those countries, so ensuring worker safety, identifying and remediating safety issues in factories.

Dusty Rhodes  9:34  
I would imagine then that a large part of that solution is having to train local teams. Am I correct?

Colm Quinn  9:39  
Yeah, so the approach in Pakistan has been to build our team of engineers, which we've done over the past two years, and to kick start that program. When I worked for Arup, myself and Aidan and colleagues came to Pakistan a number of times. We carried out pilot inspections. We carried out initial inspections, which. Be full safety inspections of factories, but also we did those in conjunction with what were called at the time the new hires, which are now our engineers in Pakistan, doing that work of identifying safety issues and following through group remediation.

Dusty Rhodes  10:15  
So on a day to day basis, then what is it that you're doing Colm?

Colm Quinn  10:18  
I'll speak specifically about Pakistan, that's where we have our main operations. So we have a big focus on the moment on the engineering side, to do initial inspections, as Aidan mentioned, structural engineering, but we also inspect for fire, electrical and boiler safety engineering. Right now, we've inspected just over 300 factories. We are in the process of for those 300 factories of what we call the remediation phase. So after the initial inspection, we produce a an action plan for the factory which address the most serious life safety concerns in the factory. So as Aidan alluded to earlier, it's really just focused on life safety issues, so we then follow through with remediation monitoring that involves us going back to the factory on a periodic basis to monitor the progress of the factory as they deal with these issues.

Dusty Rhodes  11:14  
Colm, when you're working with local teams, how do you make sure? Because I'm sure lots of us listening. We live in a first world, Western world. Bangladesh is completely different. Is there a difference in the standard of engineering? And how do you get engineers to the standard you need them to be at? 

Colm Quinn  11:31  
I'll speak about the Accord and the engineers in the Accord, the program is quite unique in that it's dealing with existing buildings. There's no code that I know or have come across and Ed might correct me, where existing buildings are front and foremost in the code. This is a problem not just in Asia. We're dealing with existing buildings. Engineers need to be retrained or refocused to deal with the issues within existing buildings. As a an engineer myself, as a design engineer, myself, starting with a blank sheet of paper is I'm not saying it's easy, but it's easier to deal with a live, functioning full of workers, full of process building to try and remediate that that's quite difficult. It's true. Working on it, we worked with Arup to get our engineers in that mindset of dealing with existing, this stock of building. It's not a Bangladesh problem. It's not a Pakistan problem, it's an engineering problem.

Dusty Rhodes  12:27  
Colm, you're very much at the coal face of it. Aidan, you're kind of a bit more step because you're based in Dublin. Tell me why is Arup continuing to be involved in this project?

Aidan Madden  12:36  
Think we have very shared values, actually, in how we operate and how we think, like, the Accord mission, if you like, is about making workplaces safer for those workers. Like, that's what it's there to do. And I think within our own organization, our own kind of ethos or and values are are aligned to that. Our founder many, many years ago talked about things that were really important to him at the time, and one of the things he talked about was doing socially useful work, doing work that really has an impact, you know, has a direct impact. And, you know, strategies come and go, but today, our strategy and the company talks about making safer and more resilient places. And if this kind of work that we're doing in places like Bangladesh and Pakistan, isn't aligned to that. Well, I then, I don't know what is, I think it's the direct impact of the work. We see that as really important. I think my colleagues who've worked on this, and I would say there's, you know, we're probably numbering 200 people who've had an involvement in this since we started work with the Accords, they can see that, you know, and they recognize, and even those who aren't involved can recognize that this work matters, like for us as engineers, you know whether you know wherever you work, and whether you know part of our our profession is about, you know, is doing good, right? You know for others, and, you know, creating safer workplaces, I think, falls squarely into that we're only here as a support act really. You know, the the engineers who work for the Accord, who are out there every day like they're the ones who are really, you know, at the coalface, really live in this and we're here, or have been here, to support them and get them into a place where they can be really effective at their work and kind of applying their engineering skills, maybe in a different way, and I think that's what we've tried to bring to them over the last two years as part of our capacity building program.

Dusty Rhodes  14:31  
Aidan, considering that Colm is at the coalface, and you're back in Dublin, and you've got a better bird's eye view, can you give us some of the numbers that have been achieved over the years, like, how many factories have been checked, how many serious safety problems have been fixed, that kind of thing.

Aidan Madden 14:46  
I think Colm's probably going to be best placed. 

Dusty Rhodes  14:47  
Well, then Colm's, the better man go on. Colm hit me with numbers. 

Colm Quinn  14:52  
The accord, combined with the RC in Bangladesh, inspected over 2000 factories and have identified over 104 40,000 individual health and safety findings, and of those, over 115,000 have been corrected.

Dusty Rhodes  15:09  
They're the big numbers. Those are big numbers. So yeah, one to ask, I don't know which of you is the better one to answer, but what's the system? How do you go in, you know, as an engineer, and do this work at scale and at speed. What's your checklist? 

Colm Quinn  15:25  
The work has transitioned over the years from a very paper based take a picture on your phone, go back to the office and write a report. So in Pakistan and in Bangladesh, we're transitioning to a digital workflow, and we're joining up as many pieces as we can. So when the engineer stands in the factory, they've got a an iPad in their hand. When they take a picture, that picture goes on to our database, and we've taken a CRM or a customer relationship manager tool, and we've we've modified it, and we've highly modified it to be able to take just that raw data from an inspection, sort it out, into these actionable items for factories to deal with. So the issue identified, what the factory need to do, a picture of the issue like very, very simple action plan, taking that that becomes our database when we want to print the reports, again, a lot of work to get this done, but now we press a button and we print off a PDF of the report. Once that's that's the inspection phase, we have a it's the inspection and remediation process so but once the inspection is done, I don't know. Maybe that's 5% of the work. The rest of the work is after that. It's working with the factory for them to come up with plans, financial plans, engineering plans, products, effectively the solution. And we work with them. But as we're working with the factory, at the factory are asking us questions. We're getting them to update our database. We're giving them direct access to our database. So if they want to tell us, you know, we have a question, they ask the question in our database. It doesn't look like a database to them, but it's our database. If they want to submit drawings, they submit them, rather than through an email, they'll submit them into into the database. I think we've 650 factories, so we're pushing all that information into one place.

Dusty Rhodes  17:25  
It sounds like a very well honed system at this stage. Aiden, you would have been responsible, I guess, for helping to set up this system when, when you were thinking about it initially, what were the problems that you had to overcome?

Aidan Madden  17:36  
Yeah, I think the scale factor is really significant. You know, Colm talked about 650 factories in Pakistan alone. So which that turns into 650 remediation projects. So you have a program of works. So I suppose, going back to the initiation point, which is the initial inspections that you know, and which we've mentioned a bit, for those you know, we're the teams become very focused on the key safety issues. So the electrical safety, the fire safety, the boiler safety, the structural safety, because those are the things that we know cause life safety issues that cause people to either be killed or injured, the consequences of events caused by those you know an electrical safety issue, causes a fire and so on. In the designing the overall structure, the overall program, it's okay identify the issue, then what are you going to do about it? It's the what and the so what? What are the actions that need to be taken to address that particular safety issue? What are the reasonable timelines that you can take them in. What do you need to do now? What should you be doing in the medium term? And what's going to take a longer term action and making those actions specific, clear, time bound? Really? That that's the kind of fuel which enables the factories, you know, they own, the actions, ultimately, that enables them to actually deliver the solutions. And so then you've identified the issues, you've identified the starting point for the plan, and then, as Colm said, it's about supporting the factories and their own engineering teams through their remediation program. And this is, I suppose, a lot of the work that the Accord has been doing, and we've supported them in various ways over the years, in this work, in collaboration, it's about, how do you make sure that the factories are doing it in a way which meets the requirements of the Accord, which are all set out in the Accord standard, and then monitoring that all the way through to the end? And I think it's worth saying this is what makes the Accord unique, is that this program at scale, you know where it's we're setting kind of mandatory requirements, which are carried out in collaboration with all the stakeholders, so with the workers, with the factory owners, with the brands, and convening all those together and being. Transparent, you know? So the reports that are produced, the plans that are produced, are published, so anyone can go and see them online. So it's a highly transparent process. It is worth noting how unique this is. This is definitely a first time that this approach has been taken.

Dusty Rhodes  20:19  
It is. It's most unusual. Aidan. I have a hard question for you, okay, because it's very hard to speak about yourself. I mentioned in the intro that you were accredited by engineers Ireland as international Engineer of the Year. What was the engineering piece of what you did that you think got their attention and won that award for you, you're right.

Aidan Madden  20:41  
That is hard question. It probably boils down to providing that kind of technical, technically robust and rigorous approach which can be scaled up and, you know, like that award was probably on behalf of, you know, the 200 other people who worked on it with me, you know, so I think it's that technical rigor. So it's providing a meaningful framework to make decisions about the safety in those factories, to provide actions in a way which can be used by the factory themselves to ultimately implement the solution. And to do that, you know, not just in one factory, not just in 650 in Pakistan, not just in the probably 1800 or so in Bangladesh. It's that this becomes a scalable approach. And, you know, we say scalable, it trips off the tongue. Sounds easy, but it still requires a lot of hard work, a lot of perseverance, a lot of dedication by teams to implement

Dusty Rhodes  21:42  
Colm. A difficult question for you, because you are in Pakistan, you're seeing these workers every day. Do you ever feel because you're an engineer, and as an engineer, we're used to, you know, building things and constructing things, and we're more interested in concrete and the physicalities of stuff, whereas Colm, you're looking at people, and the work that you do actually helps save those people's lives. Do you ever kind of look back at that and kind of think, think about that?

Colm Quinn  22:09  
To answer that in one word is, yes, I do think about it. It's that impact is what got me into the Accord, kind of, you know, as I worked for Arup with the Accord, I had a certain amount of impact, but now I've direct access to our engineers to support them, to to answer their questions, to get things out of their way, to get them to focus on just hazards, like they they're not going into a factory, they're Not losing their notes. They're not, you know, really, like the really simple stuff. They're not going in thinking, you know, what should I be doing here? Or how, you know, do I get it on Google notes, or do I use, you know,  a notepad.

Dusty Rhodes  22:53  
Do you get that reaction from people a lot, where you see you're trying to explain something to them, which to us would seem very simple, but then you suddenly see that little light bulb go off over their head where they're going. Ah, I get it. Do you get that? 

Colm Quinn  23:06  
A lot, yeah, yeah. So when I get asked, What do I do? I first answer as an engineer, and then if they're interested, they are, what type of engineer? Oh, where do you work? And then I don't start with the full story. Yeah, that would bore everybody. I only bore a select few of people with the with the story. Great.

Dusty Rhodes  23:26  
Yeah, engineers, we're lapping it up Colm. We're lapping it up Colm. From your global operations perspective, if you could offer one piece of advice to engineers about making the leap from the technical side of the job to I suppose it's a leadership role that you're in at the moment and creating social change, changing people's lives. What would that advice be?

Colm Quinn  23:46  
Advice to myself would be to keep your hand in some form of engineering. I'm lucky that the organisation I've joined is there's a lot of engineers, and we do a lot of engineering work, so it's easy for me to dip back into something I'm really comfortable with, something that I can, you know, I can add value very quickly. If I didn't have that, I think I'd find it quite difficult to completely step away from, I suppose. What would it be my core skills? But it's not always possible. People don't move to engineering organisations.

Dusty Rhodes  24:21  
Aidan, last question for yourself, because I mean, you've climbed the dizzy heights of engineering, and you have led and worked with a lot of people. What kind of people, in your view, make good engineers who move up the ladder?

Aidan Madden  24:38  
I think it is people who care about what they do, so they care about the impact of their work. I think that's I think that's important. I think they it's people who are curious, who are interested in, you know, new topics. New things, new ways of maybe new ways of doing the same old thing. I think people who are interested in people. I have another colleague who always says that, you know, people make projects. You know, it's teams who deliver projects. You know, it's, it's collaborating with others, you know, in the way that the Accord and Arup have collaborated over the years in a very open, honest, you know, sometimes we challenge each other, but we do it coming from a really good place. And I think people who go on to be, I suppose leaders in their field have those kind of qualities, where they're willing to work with people, they engage with them in a very open and honest way. To me, those are some of the secrets of success. If they are secrets even, but really it's about you know, people, you know, how do you empower people, enable people? How do you help people reach their own potential? And I think that's something that I enjoyed something that, you know, I think it's powerful stuff.

Dusty Rhodes  26:04  
Well, listen the International Accord is an absolutely amazing and fascinating project. I've put links to that and also to Arab, of course, in the description area of the podcast for today, but for now. Aidan Madden and Colm Quinn, thank you so much both for joining us. 

Colm Quinn  26:17  
Thank you. Dusty

Dusty Rhodes  26:19  
We hope you enjoyed our conversation today. If you do know another engineer who would appreciate insights like this, please share our podcast with them, and they can find us simply by searching for engineers Ireland, wherever they listen to podcasts. This episode is produced by dustpod.io for engineers Ireland, for advanced episodes, more information on the latest trends in infrastructure or career development advice, you'll find a library of information on our website at engineers ireland.ie, until next time for myself to steroids. Thank you for listening. 

GUEST DETAILS
John Gavigan joined PJ Hegarty in 1996 as a graduate engineer. He progressed within the company, embracing new responsibilities and roles, completed several projects as Contracts Manager and was appointed as Regional Director in 2023. John’s experience includes projects across several sectors: pharmaceutical, city centre commercial, healthcare, semi-conductor, logistics, education, retail and PPP bids. He was the site lead for 10 Molesworth Street and Tropical Fruit Warehouse in Dublin city centre and the Zoetis project in Tullamore.

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES
"The challenges are the things that you remember. That's what keeps it interesting." - John Gavigan

"Getting concrete trucks into the city centre location in the middle of the day during business hours was very challenging." - John Gavigan

"It's knowing how to judge when there's an opportunity." - John Gavigan

"As an engineer who has evolved as a project manager in my career, you learn different problem solving techniques, you develop analytical skills." - John Gavigan

KEYWORDS
#Engineering #City #ProjectManagement #Construction #Logistics #TrafficManagement #Safety

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription:

Dusty Rhodes  00:01
Building in highly dense city sites is not easy. 

John Gavigan  00:06
Getting concrete trucks into the city centre location in the middle of the day during business hours, was very challenging. We used Stevens green as a holding area in consultation with the guard E for our concrete trucks.

Dusty Rhodes  00:20
Hello, my name is Dusty Rhodes, and welcome to AMPLIFIED: the Engineers Journal podcast. Today, we're discovering some of the challenges of working in highly dense areas, usually in highly crowded city centres. Our guest has quite some experience in this area since joining PJ Hegarty as a graduate in 1996 he's worked across several sectors, from pharmaceutical to semiconductor and city centre, commercial to retail and PPP bids as well. It's a pleasure to welcome to the show. PJ Hegarty, Regional Director, John Gavigan. How are you, John? 

John Gavigan  00:51
I'm good. Good afternoon Dusty, glad to be here.

Dusty Rhodes  00:58
I always start by asking people what sparked your interest into getting into engineering?

John Gavigan  01:05
Well, I grew up on a farm, and there was always a little bit of concrete to be mixed, be it for a standing a gate post or doing bits and pieces of repair work around the place. So there was a natural kind of progression. I liked studying the science subjects and mathematics at school, and kind of indicated, from my chat with my career guidance teacher that engineering might be a good route. And ended up studying engineering and getting a job in the construction side of the industry, and kept going for nearly 30 years now.

Dusty Rhodes  01:39
It sounds like you were kind of like you just fell into it by accident. No huge draw for it, but you are still in the business 30 years later. So what, what do you find fulfilling about the work?

John Gavigan  01:51
Yes, that would, that would be fair. It wasn't something that I wanted to do, and was clear in my in my destination from from a young, young age. But since working with PJ equity, I found that there are a wide range of diverse projects out there, and every project is different in so far as every project will have its own specific challenges, and the challenges are the things that you remember. You know, one reinforced concrete frame building or one steel frame building might be the same as the next post. The nuances that you remember that keep that keeps it interesting. It's been, it's been said to me that to be, to be a good project manager, you have to have knowledge that's a mile wide and an inch deep. So it's fairly diverse, that the scope of knowledge that you have to have things from, like I said, concrete and steel and pure engineering, right down to the to the finishing of a job, ceiling tiles, ceiling finishes, tiles, carpets, all of that type of stuff. So it's fairly broad.

Dusty Rhodes  02:52
So you say a lot of jobs are, I would don't want to say standard, but you're able to handle kind of most of the work. But there are occasional jobs that are extra challenging. Any any particular ones that pop into mind?

John Gavigan  03:04
Yeah, I mean, I remember the downturn in kind of 2009/2010 there was much work going on in 2010 for the following years afterwards, and we won a project on Molesworth Street. It was the old passport office, and the job entailed demolition of the existing structure and deepening the basement. It was already a two-story basement. There, we had to construct a third story, all of which had to be done in a live city center setting, immediately adjacent to a Georgian building built in the 1700s and we had to excavate, you know, 11 meters below that, unaware of what footings were built in the 1700s and we had to make sure that everything was carried out safely.

Dusty Rhodes  03:52
Obviously, I know the building, you mean, on 10 Molesworth Street, because I remember, got my first passport from there. But what kind of rules and regulations and planning and everything do you have to go through when you are building a modern building, besides something that's 200 years old.

John Gavigan  04:07
The standard way of ensuring that you can excavate a basement safely is to install a secant pile wall around the full perimeter, which basically means you're coring. You're coring down with a large, 70 ton machine and placing a column of concrete 10, 12, 14, meters, and you're reinforcing every second pile with a reinforcing steel cage to give it the strength to withstand the pressure of the soil and the traffic driving by in the adjacent the adjacent street, so that allows you to excavate without the risk of either the soil collapsing in a top or, in the case of the Georgian building, the Georgian building been undermined and and settling and cracking and having failure start now where, where you have buildings immediately adjacent to an excavation for a basement, you would carry out an. For level of assessment, we engaged a specialist design engineer with experience in temporary works design like this. So in addition to the second pile wall, we put in a considerable amount of extra thought and effort and concrete underpinning and also raking, raking steel anchors, which are basically steel steel rods drilled in at typically 45 degrees and grouted in place with a like a weak concrete mix of cementitious grout to give extra hold and extra strength to the ground and to ensure that there's no no slippage. And obviously, you can imagine a 1700s building if there's any sort of movement at all, you're potentially going to get serious cracks or even more catastrophic failure.

Dusty Rhodes  05:47
Now, somebody came up with the design creative for the building and the plans for that, and then when you eventually arrive on site and you see all of these problems that you have to solve, did that change the initial design at all subtly.

John Gavigan  06:02
Yes, typically, we inherited design and and we build it, but we do advise on on ways to improve the project for all parties involved. And if there, if there is a way that the design can be subtly, subtly changed to make it easier or better, then we do that. I mean, there was, there was a quite a large concrete slab in the in the basement. Getting concrete trucks into the city center, location in the middle of the day during business hours, was very challenging. It was designed with, you know, several slab bores in mind, because typically the size, the size of the slab, is determined by how quickly you can get the concrete deliveries to the site. So we discussed with the consultant about increasing the slab pore sizes. The reinforcing was amended to suit and we had with bigger pores. As it happens, we and we chose to do them at night time. So we used Stevens green as a holding area in consultation with the guard E for our concrete trucks. We brought them down with traffic marshals as needed, and we hit, you know, three, three stations set up to pump the concrete from around the perimeter of Molesworth Street, Setanta place and Frederick Street, for anyone that knows the area. So we had three, three angles of attack, whereas that just wouldn't be possible during business hours.

Dusty Rhodes  07:25
It sounds like an organizational nightmare. Was it okay dealing with various authorities to be able to close off streets and to get the trucks in?

John Gavigan  07:33
Yes, um, Dublin City Council or the local authority, and any work outside of ours had to be, had to be done with their approval. Permits were generally issued, and it was a requirement that we consulted with neighbors. We did have a good relationship with with the neighbors. We engaged with them from very early on in that project. In fact, I can remember the very first Christmas that we were there, myself and two of my colleagues, and we spent two afternoons knocking on doors and shaking hands and actually meeting people. We handed over our contact information, and I have to say, you know, we didn't get any spurious complaints. We did get a number of inquiries over the course of the project. The project was three, three years. We made some good friends. We got to know a few people we didn't always have the the answer or the explanation that the neighbors wanted, but I think they always understood, and we certainly had. We left, we left there with no complaints. And it worked. Worked very well. The local authority wouldn't tend to issue permits for subsequent out-of-hours work if you didn't comply with their conditions for the early ones. So that worked very well.

Dusty Rhodes  08:42
There's an awful lot of development going down, or there has been the last, certainly, 10/15, years in the Dawson Street area. I know that developing the corner of Dawson Street, just at Trinity College, the bottom of Dawson Street, from your experience, when you are literally in the beating heart of the city center. What are the biggest challenges in the project for you, working in that dense area?

John Gavigan  09:07
It's the logistics of getting material in and out. Most of the workforce are accustomed to starting early, so it's not unusual to have 100 guys at the site for 7am, the key to servicing the project is getting deliveries in early ahead, ahead of the traffic. So they would often be in, especially if they're coming from overseas, or particularly challenging logistic deliveries that would be that required the big the big trucks, the big Arctic, 13-metre trucks, or even longer, if there are specialist items that has to be brought in and brought in early. If there's any any traffic movement, it has to be managed with traffic marshes at the periphery of the site. Any interaction with pedestrians or public traffic really has has to be managed by, typically two or three specialists, trained traffic marshals. So the experience of those guys is. Is really what we rely on. It's knowing how to judge when there's an opportunity. It's professionally designed by a traffic management consultant, and the plan and the vehicle movements will all be tracked with with software to verify that where we designed for a pull in area will actually work. So there's, there's, there is science behind it, and then the local authority then have to issue their permits for these pull in areas, if they take off, you know, footpath areas or whatever. So it's, it's something that is thought out, that that is, that is the key to it. Building is typically easy. It's as easy to build in a green field site five miles out outside of the city centre as it is in the city centre, but it's getting the material and service, and it is the key.

Dusty Rhodes  10:39
What lesson did you learn from that project that you would apply to future developments?

John Gavigan  10:43
Well, that's an interesting question. The project immediately after that actually was an equally challenging one. Is an office development on the keys, and it was more challenging and so far as it only had one entrance, a narrow entrance immediately off the keys. So while Molesworth Street was very busy on three sides, the three Busy, busy rows were on three sides of it. This one on the keys only had, in fact, one entrance to it. So the logistics challenges and tricks that we had learned on Molesworth Street were useful in the follow-up project immediately afterwards.

Dusty Rhodes  11:21
Are you talking about the tropical fruit warehouse? Are you? That's right too. That's a go. I mean, for people who don't know it, it's a beautiful red brick building, and I believe, from the late 1890s and it kind of contract. What I love about is, when you walk across the Samuel Beckett bridge, you see this beautiful, old red brick building, and then it's just surrounded by modern glass, left, right and center. But getting into that site was particularly hard for you because it was only the one at one entrance. So what did you learn then from Molesworth Street that you were able to apply then with the tropical fruit warehouse?

John Gavigan  11:56
Yeah, it's it's been able to have the same guys that were managing the traffic. One team moved from one job to the next, and it's a matter of making sure that we had the guys that knew, knew how to knew how to deal with it very challenging, and everything had to be scheduled, but to within an inch of its life. You know, it was all look ahead, daily, daily coordination to make sure that deliveries arrived. If deliveries didn't arrive on time in the midst of slap by a few minutes, then unfortunately, they had to. They had to reshape it,

Dusty Rhodes  12:28
from the sounds of it. It's the logistics of getting everything to the site. But once everything is there, construction goes on as usual. I can imagine, with a nice I'm going to call it a simple construction where you have a space and you're pulling up a building, but with the tropical fruit warehouse, you have to keep the original building from the 1890s and build over and around and behind it. That must have presented some unique construction challenges for you.

John Gavigan  12:55
It sure did. I mean, as you've described it there is pretty accurate. So it's an existing two-storey warehouse. It had a slated roof on timber trusses. The original timber trusses were there from the 1800s, typically a 14-metre span or thereabouts. The timber trusses themselves had evidence of a lot of decay at the ends of them. Think 12 of the 30 trusses required significant refurbishment, so the roof was stripped, the slates were all stored and salvaged for reuse, and the timber trusses were taken carefully off-site and sent for refurbishment, where the ends, where there was decay present, were removed. All the joints were tested and refurbished, and a special splice detail at Timber resin splice was installed to replace the bearing ends where the timber had decayed. And that was actually carried out with timber that was salvaged from an old church in Leeds in Yorkshire. So the specialist company that we used use this recycled salvage timber, because modern timber wouldn't have the same engineering properties as fully seasoned timber that had been used in a similar application. So that was the roof, part of it, and once the roof was taken off, we had to construct a six-storey new reinforced concrete core. And that was one of the one of the timber, one of the concrete towers that you'll see poured around typical project in the city center. But what was different then was we constructed a two story steel frame that was basically hanging off this central core. So it's a cantilevered steel structure, you know, four and five floors, plus a plant room on top for the sixth floor. So in order to safely construct a hanging steel frame, we basically had to build it up from the ground. So we built a six story steel structure, but when it was complete, then removed floors, one to one to three. Inclusive below, if that makes sense. So we had to build fill it up to support it, and then when the permanent connections were in place, we controlled the removal of the temporary steel frame underneath it, which was three stories.

Dusty Rhodes  15:16
Did you have the confidence to know that when you removed it, everything was still remain standing?

John Gavigan  15:25
I mean, there was, there was so much attention given to that that there was never any any concern that anything was going to go significantly wrong. But we were obviously concerned that everything went 100% right, as it happened, it did. I mean, there was a whole, whole series of transfer of weight. So if you can imagine that the propping steel, the temporary steel, removed from from the permanent structure, initially, you're going to get a sagging under the self weight of the steel, steel frame when you remove the temporary, temporary support. So it is going to it is going to psych the next stage was we, we poured concrete slabs, and that's going to introduce yet, yet, further settlement, extra weight. And then the not insignificant weight of the glass cladding on the on the facade is going to introduce more weight and more deflection. So at each of those three stages, we measured deflection to verify that the structure was doing what it was supposed to do. The consultants who designed the steel frame had included predicted deflections for each of these stages, and we monitored them in the world within the expected range, thankfully.

Dusty Rhodes  16:41
Do you remember what the deflection was?

John Gavigan  16:44
Yeah, it would have been 25 millimetres, and slightly over that in some, some instances, I mean, there's quite, there's quite a significant distance from the point of support to the to the edge of the structure. The cantilever was 14 meters. I think that's the highest point.

Dusty Rhodes  17:01
Working with the tropical fruit warehouse and with 10 Molesworth Street, you are working with very, very old buildings. Besides, you know, brand new modern constructions. How do modern building codes and regulations work with such old buildings? It's like you were talking with the roof and the struts, and everything do you have to maintain the originals?

John Gavigan  17:22
That's that's a very interesting question, and that's something that we discussed at length at the start of the project, because the and you've actually hit the nail on the head there with the timber trusses. So the timber trusses were whatever 18, 1870s and we know they were fit for purpose, because they've been supporting the roof for the last 100 and whatever it is, well over 100 years. Yet, when we took them off, refurbished them and put them back on, the designer is responsible for certifying that they can withstand the future loads and comply with modern building codes. So in order to do that, initially it was thought, well, there's a lot of iron fittings, wrought iron fittings connecting the various node points of of the timber trusses. Like I said, these timber trusses were over a ton in weight, 14-metre span, you know, eight feet higher there. But lots, lots of interconnecting struts and different timbers, timber sections and compression and tension and lots happening at all the joints, so that the engineer responsible for the design and start to find it wanted to be satisfied that the timber was sound and the metal fittings were sound. So one way of doing that is to dismantle the fittings and the joints, carry out analysis of the timber to check for the presence of rot, and make sure the fibers are all in good condition. The timber is performing well. Carry out X-rays of the metal fittings to make sure there's no micro cracks and future potential for failure. But the specialists advised guys, if we do that, we're likely to damage a lot of the fittings and possibly the timber and the chances of being able to reinstate using the initial materials is is slim. You know, you're looking at potentially more than half, half of the joints having to be redone, which goes against the conservation ethos of the project. And you know, there's other other complications as well, like costing more money, which is often the consideration point. But in order to satisfy ourselves, there was a quite, quite an innovative testing regime set up. None of the none of the people involved in the project had come across it before. It came from a specialist consultant from the UK who was working with the refurbishment contractor that we were using, and when I've gone into it in too much detail, it was a dynamic loading rig was set up, and a sample number of the trusses were put through their courses with loading to mimic the permanent scheme. And all of the trusses that were tested were found to be well. Capable of carrying, of carrying the loads that they'd be subjected to, much better performing than if they were designed for new and modern. Trusses will be designed to perform much more efficiently. There's a lot more redundancy, a lot more spare capacity in these trusses. So there was a lot of effort went into checking and making sure that all the trusses were were performing well, and a good sample of them were load tested, and that got us over the line. So that means that everybody can sleep at night knowing that the structure is performing and will comply with modern building codes.

Dusty Rhodes  20:33
With the tropical fruit warehouse and again, Molesworth Street on the Georgian buildings there. Do you ever sit back and consider the work that some other engineer had done on that site 200 years ago.

John Gavigan  20:48
Yes, I mean that tropical fruit warehouse. When we took possession of the site, there was an old masonry wall that had a significant build-up of whitewash, or at least white paint. Over the years, we removed that as part of the scope to clean it up and expose the masonry. And became evident that this was an historic wall from an even older building on the site of the photographer warehouse there had been the Hibernian school, and that was used to educate orphan children of sailors who perished at sea. And it was built in the in the 1700s so there was quite a sizable chunk of this. This wall had been used as as the external wall of the warehouse that was built 100 years later in the 1800s so this was worth saving. So unless this was discovered, the project was actually redesigned, went back for revised planning, where this wall was made a feature of fabulous walls, but 20 meters long, had a few of the the windows and door openings were still still evident in them. They had been blocked up with modern block work. So they were they were cleared out, opened up again, and new suitable windows were put in as part of the conservation effort. And this was exposed. So yes, I did often think, chatting with our own crew there, you know, do you think there's anything that we're building now is going to be refurbished in 100/150 years time? Probably not.

Dusty Rhodes  22:22
Let me ask you about your mind space, about something that engineers of 200 years ago today, and I'm sure in 200 years time, the impact of deadlines and budget changes and all that kind of stuff, when you're hit with uh oh, that's going to add another six months onto a project, or that's going to cost us an extra 250, 500 grand on the project build. How do you handle it? Do you sit back and you very cool person to kind of go, right? We'll work through it. Or do you panic?

John Gavigan  22:52
Try not to panic. That's for sure. As an engineer who has kind of evolved as a project manager in my career, you learn different problem-solving techniques. You develop analytical skills where you can assess a different problem in many ways. That's, you know, an engineer solves problems, and that's, that's, that's a lot, a lot of what we do.

Dusty Rhodes  23:15
And I think that's probably what I'm asking you, John, is kind of what, what is your problem-solving thinking. Like, you know, when you, when you're hit with something, do you have a process of of how you handle that?

John Gavigan  23:27
Well, I won't give you away all of my secrets, yeah, just look, I mean, when we, when we're managing a project, there's, you know, 100 or 200 people will be on those sites that I've just described there. So my number one responsibility is the site lead is to make sure that all of those, all of those people, go home safely at the end of every day. And that's not to be understated like there's this huge heavy equipment, there is a lot of potential hazardous activity goes on to build a 4050, 60 million euro project in the city center. As I mentioned, there's a lot of vehicular movement as a lot of kids going on that that has to be the primary concern, coupled couple with that responsibility, you need to deliver the project on time, but that can never supersede the the importance of doing it safely. So in fairness to the industry, then the client based in the consultant base that we would deal with, there is generally an understanding of that. I mean, there is an understanding of that so that that's a given. How do you improve a project when there's something new, some curveball gets, gets sent to you that requires extra time. You know, you can, you can put additional resources on the project, you can work longer hours. You can start doing night shifts if, if needs be. There are ways and means, and typically it's it's additional resources. But that's not always straight, straightforward. The best answer I would have to avoid that situation is communication and lots of planning and lots of discussion to. To make sure that any changes can be incorporated. There's lots of lots of knowledge and lots of skill in the industry. If something is landed on you, if not time to think, then that's, that's, that's when problems arise. But if there's communication across all stakeholders, it's generally possible to find, find the solution. The other element of every project we have to have to consider, as you mentioned, is the commercial side, which that generally happens. And one of my ex-bosses once told me, he said, people will always remember if there was a serious accident on the site. People will always see the quality of a job when it's when it's finished, because it's there for years after, he said people, generally, only very few people, will know if a project has made money or not, if it's commercially successful. And he said people will forget if it was a few weeks or a month late. The most important elements of a job are safety and producing a good quality, because people will be walking by the front door of it for years to come, and we'll always see what it looks like. I've always remembered that, and I think there's a fair amount of truth in that.

Dusty Rhodes  26:05
Well, listen on that, on that scale, and that's great advice you've got. Is there a piece of career advice that you wish that you had received earlier that you could now impart?

John Gavigan  26:16
Well, and if somebody was to come to me and asked me about a potential career in the construction industry. I would definitely promote it. And as I mentioned earlier, it's it's very diverse. There's no There's no such thing as ever having a boring day. But like I mentioned there, every every project has, has its challenges. The timber trusses on on the roof, on the on the keys, there's a triple basement excavation with the special attention to another Georgia. Georgian building is the cantilevered and controlled deflection of a two story steel, steel frame up at four and fourth and fifth stories. There are things that definitely take the potential for boredom out of your out of your day. There's never a dull moment. Every project is different, and every project is effectively like a new job. So if you're, if you're working with a group of people and things, things are going well, that's great, but there's always difficulties. You know, there's light at the end of the tunnel. Most projects are only on site for, you know, 1212, to 18 months. I would encourage anybody coming to the industry to do what they like, study something that that you like, and if that takes you down the construction route, then great. I mean, there, there are opportunities to work, work in design, work for a consultant, work for a building contractor, and you can specialize in any number of areas. Sustainability is a continually growing part of the industry, and we've, we've a lot of people. We have a full team of people working in that whereas 10 years ago, that was a relatively new part of the industry. So there's lots to do.

Dusty Rhodes  27:55
Very true, very true. If you'd like to find out more about John and some of the topics that we spoke about today, you'll find notes and links in the description area of the podcast and I'll make sure to include photos and links to the two projects we were talking about which was 10 Molesworth Street and also the Tropical Fruit Warehouse that we were talking about earlier as well. But for now, John Gavigan, regional director of PJ Hegarty. Thank you so much for chatting with us. 

John Gavigan  28:17
Thank you very much. 

Dusty Rhodes  28:18
If you enjoyed our podcast today, do share with a friend in the business just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland AMPLIFIED in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for engineers Ireland for advanced episodes and more information on career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on the website at engineersireland.ie. Until next time from myself, Dusty Rhodes. Thank you very much for listening.

GUEST DETAILS
Alasdair Henderson is BAM UK & Ireland’s Executive Director of Ireland. Alasdair joined BAM as a graduate engineer in 1996 and has worked his way up through a variety of operational and business leadership roles across BAM. 

He is well known as an advocate of purpose-led business, believing that the best and most sustainable financial results are achieved when the things we build add value to society.  He holds safety, quality, inclusion, and collaboration as key tenets of what makes a good business and is delighted that he sees all these things on a daily basis at BAM.  

Alasdair is actively involved in policy development in the industry and is a fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, a fellow of the Institute of Quarrying, and a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde.  

Connect with Alasdair on LinkedIn 

MORE INFORMATION
Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES
"The time you spend thinking most about safety is normally immediately after an accident." - Alasdair Henderson 

"It's one of the largest buildings in Europe." - Alasdair Henderson 

"If you start with a misaligned scope, it never gets better. It just gets worse and worse and worse." - Alasdair Henderson 

"You can absolutely make those environments safer, warmer, more welcoming by changing the way you design that infrastructure." - Alasdair Henderson 

"Our industry is addicted to concrete and steel. If we want to get to net zero, we're going to have to do something around that." - Alasdair Henderson 

KEYWORDS
#Engineering #Construction #BAMIreland #NationalChildrensHospital #PublicProcurement #Sustainability #Diversity #Digitalisation

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription.

Dusty Rhodes  00:04
Hi there, my name is Dusty Rhodes, and you're welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast. Often engineering is focused on the technical, logistical and production parts of a project. Today, we're going to hear from a leading engineer who believes that the best outcomes are reached by focusing on the people. 

Alasdair Henderson  00:22
The reason the construction goes wrong is that the expectation of the customer and the belief from the contractor of what they're providing starts misaligned. So that's scope misalignment, it never gets better.

Dusty Rhodes  00:33
Our guest today has almost 30 years of experience with one of Ireland's leading construction companies, where he's worked in business operations and HR before moving on to the C suite.

Alasdair Henderson  00:43
The time you spend thinking most about safety is normally immediately after an accident. 

Dusty Rhodes  00:49
It's a pleasure to welcome BAM UK and Ireland's Executive Director of Ireland. Alasdair Henderson, Alasdair, how are you?

Alasdair Henderson  00:55
I'm fine. Dusty. Good to meet you.

Dusty Rhodes  00:59
Now, listen, I always get wild and varied answers to this first question, how did you get into this wonderful game of engineering? What was the little thing when you were a kid that went, 'whoa, I want to do that'?

Alasdair Henderson  01:10
Well, I had a head start Dusty. So my father was a civil engineer, still is a civil engineer, retired, but it's just not, it's a lifestyle choice. It's not something you give up. So as we I'm one of four boys. As we went around on various holidays with the family, we were perpetually standing up beside various structures for Dad to take photographs. We thought he was photographing us. He was there. He had us there for scale. So it sort of becomes a way of life. And so I've got a very vivid memory of when I was about five years old going to one of the projects that Dad was working on. It was a tunnel project in Aberdeen. Of course, five years old, I had a hard hat that didn't fit me, and we went down a shaft in a Ricky old cage, sharing the cage with a box of nitroglycerin explosives, and then went out along the tunnel. And when you're five years old, boy, does that make an impression on you. So I think it was, I wouldn't say it was predestined, but it was pretty well set up. So that's how I got into it.

Dusty Rhodes  02:08
So you just kind of went through secondary school and then on into university and everything. And when you came out, then as a new graduate, you pretty much joined, BAM, straight away, and you stayed there your whole career. What kept you there?

Alasdair Henderson  02:20
Well, we do fantastic, interesting things, and I've moved around in the business, doing a lot of different things. So when I joined, I actually joined as a student. I did two years of summer work as a student and did some just extraordinary jobs. Again, working in tunnels, working in ground, investigation and characterisation. I studied civil engineering with geology, which is a slightly odd thing. It's civil engineering infrastructure, as you would expect engineering to be taught, but with this wonderful little thing of geology thrown in there, which normally engineering is very analytical. You know very much about the answers, very much about things having definite answers. And then you throw in the natural world and all this ambiguity that comes with it, and you start to realise just how you know how much we deal with it through engineering. You know, that has natural variability to it. We'll come back to that because it's a really interesting subject as to how you deal with ambiguity generally. But that got me into that got me into ground engineering. So I joined BAM as as a ground engineer. And gosh, every, every three or four years, I was doing something different in BAM. So interesting, nice, big business with huge opportunity.

Dusty Rhodes  03:21
You have a particular fascination with tunnels and being underground, and I believe you were involved in quite a big underground project in London at one stage.

Alasdair Henderson  03:31
I was, yeah, look, we have spent a lot of my time underground. It's, it is a thing that either thrills you or horrifies you, and you know, so Crossrail is the project you're talking about. We as a business, we did a lot of the tunnelling in Crossrail. My particular part of the business was looking after how you deal with the settlement in the ground that happens when you make these tunnels. So if you can imagine, when you bore a tunnel, which is what we were doing in London, the ground around it relaxes, and as the ground relaxes, the structures on the surface start to settle down. Now we were, we were tunnelling under Mayfair in London, you know, the highest value property in London, banks, jewellers, you know, amazing places. You know, it's just an... it's a natural factor of making those big horizontal holes in the ground that the ground relaxes. So the predictions were that we would have settlement of maybe up to 200 or 300 millimetres in some places. And of course, you can't have that with a building. So we have this technique called compensation grouting, where we inject liquid cement above the tunnel to jack the ground back up again. So you don't get 200 millimetres of settlement all at once. You get 10 millimetres, and then we push it back up by 10 millimetres. Then you get another 10, and we push it back up by 10, so the building stays in the same place, the tunnel stays in the same place, and we sort of fill in the gap with compensation graduating. It was wonderful.

Dusty Rhodes  04:50
That sounds logical, but explain to me the scale that you're doing that on.

Alasdair Henderson  04:56
So we would sink a shaft. And you know, I would love to. Take people on tours around Mayfair, because I can say we had a shaft there. We had a shaft there, but we would, we would have a vertical shaft, and then we would drill out horizontally up to 90 meters. So we'd be drilling, and the head of the drill would be two or three streets away with, you know, hundreds of 1000s of people every day walking above these things, traffic, going, businesses operating, absolutely unaware that that's what was in place. And we had these arrays, these beautiful arrays of grout pipes in the ground that allowed us to access every point where we needed to put crowd. And we could just inject every time the monitoring system said we're seeing some settlement here, we could go to that particular location and just push it back up again.

Dusty Rhodes  05:38
Are there any other particular projects that kind of bring back good memories like that for you.

Alasdair Henderson  05:42
Oh, sure, I did one in called Locky tunnels, which is in the Northern Highlands of Scotland, which was hydroelectric tunnels. So these are aqueduct tunnels that allow water to be collected in one part of the hillside and taken through this tunnel and put into a reservoir, and then they're used to generate hydropower. These tunnels are typically between about two and a half to four meters in diametre. Two sets of tunnels here totalling 24 kilometres long. So you know, going going through mountains in Scotland. Now it's from a technical standpoint, it's wonderful, it's interesting. It's all those things they were bored in the 50s, and we were in there repairing them, stabilised, and then doing rock bolting, hard rock tunnels, so they're unlined. And you go through the middle of this mountain and you see these, you see the rock all around you, and it's beautiful. I mean, it's you just, you know, you see this fresh-looking rock. But there's something that's even better. I mean, you've taken an ultraviolet light, and this is the geologist in me. You've taken an ultraviolet light, and you switch off every other light, and you switch on the UV light, it causes some of the minerals in the rock to fluoresce. And it's like, I don't know, it's like being in a movie. It's things just shine and sparkle. It's, it's like diamond mines that you might see in a Disney film. And it is just the most stunningly beautiful natural phenomenon. So, yeah, look, there's, there are so many things in that kind of length of career. One of the real pleasures of working in infrastructure and engineering, particularly as a contractor, is you go to some incredibly interesting places, and you see things, and you go to places that nobody else is allowed to see or see, so wonderful.

Dusty Rhodes  07:15
So listen, tell me about your career then, because you've kind of pivoted through all of those like, hands-on engineering projects, and then you kind of got into business roles, and then on to people and culture. Just tell me briefly, the story of your journey.

Alasdair Henderson  07:27
So I went to university fairly young. That's just the Scottish education system I studied at Glasgow. So I say, I've got, I've got three brothers at that time. You went to your local university because, well, you couldn't really afford to see anything else. That's where you went to, yeah, turned out to be a very good university. I really enjoyed my time there. Came out, and as I say, I'd done two years of working as a student, as a contractor, and I think as a young engineer, I had done what was a very theoretical degree. So the view was, you know, I'll do maybe five years in contracting, and then I'll move off into consultancy, and I'll be a consultant engineer for the rest of my life. Yeah, it didn't happen. I went straight into contracting, into a part of the business which was focused on ground engineering, a sort of specialist contracting business on ground engineering, and it was a really interesting way to start your career. So one of the things about specialist businesses is that they are very close to their customers, and they're very close to the doing of things. What a lot of people don't understand around the contracting industry at Tier One is there's a lot of subcontracting. There's a lot of management of subcontractors for us as a business, a lot of direct delivery as well. But a lot of the activity and construction happens within that specialist supply chain. So people are employed there, and they do the special things that once you add it all together, makes construction. So as a young engineer, the first thing I did was went out onto projects and started to run them. And you were given a project. It had to be planned, it had to be priced, it had to be won. And then when you landed on the project, you had to deliver it, which meant organising your own resources, understanding what they cost, making sure that you are applying for the money that you are earning, working with the customer. To understand, is the customer satisfied? Are they getting the thing they need? Managing your workforce and then reporting all that back, forecasting where you're going to end up, all the other bits and pieces that come from the business, the commerce of contracting and of course, as a young engineer, you don't really you respond, you don't think, think twice about anything like that. You're just doing the things that people have said, No, do this. Now, do this. This is the process. Get on with it again. As a young engineer, you you're looking to do the most exciting and exotic things you can, because it's technically interesting, it's engaging, and it's very self-centered, and it's very much experience built, and all those sorts of things. You know, you know. You learn that working with customers. You learn the the the same management of a workforce, rather than leading a workforce, because at that that stage is still very much management, and you learn commercial management, which are from any business perspective, are brilliant things to learn. So that was a real plus in being in that specialist business. Yes, you know, after a few years of doing that, you start to a few things start to dawn on you that that idea that people are looking to you for their cues, that you've got this workforce that are really talented, really capable, don't come from the same background that you do. Haven't gone to university, aren't like the circle of friends that you're used to and you because of the work you do with them and working really closely with the group of people that you need in order to deliver a project, you really see how they contribute value and how they make their own contributions, which is an interesting realization for a young man from a privileged middle-class background, which is exactly what I was. So you start to think about leadership, not consciously, but it sort of happens, the idea that you've got to motivate people, that you've got to explain to them why they're doing the things they're doing, what it is that is important, and why we're trying to achieve the thing we're trying to achieve. Not just dish out instructions and expect people to deal with them. And you also come across some other stuff. I mean, you get tested in a way that's quite surprising, the as I say, the surprise of shifting from managing to leading and realising a that that's a thing and B is a really, really important thing, but also the surprise of having to cope with the unexpected. You know, it's a it's a regrettable fact of construction still much, much better as it is now. It is still an industry where there is significant hazard and managing safety is a real problem. And the first time you have an accident, or you're exposed to an accident, and a real human being, somebody you're responsible for, is injured, that's a that's a real moment of change for you as an individual.

Dusty Rhodes  11:31
When you talk about that, do you have a particular incident in mind that you can share?

Alasdair Henderson  11:36
I have to say, the I've got a lot in my history, unfortunately, where we you know very minor incidents, and you can look at them, you can understand how you prevent them in retrospect, and a very small number of more significant incidents, and they all leave an impact on you. And they all leave an impact on you because you learn a very interesting thing. The time you spend thinking most about safety is normally immediately after an accident. You look at it, you understand that. You think, if only you know, here's the things we could have done that would have prevented this. And a lot of what we do now, actually, within the business is is about trying to find better ways to do that, to get people to think about safety without them having to go through the consequences of having an accident in a curious thing. And this is a really interesting thing about the business right now, as as you get safer, and the accidents become further and further apart in time, the opportunities for learning get further and further apart in time. So you need to find a new way of learning. You need to find a new way that allows you triggers that. How do we make this better? And we do that through a particular way in the business now, which is really, really successful, but in those days, you know? So that was the that was the 90s, the first thing you injure somebody, or somebody's injured on your project, or you have an incident, something happens, you know, it is unplanned. It's surprising, and you are the person you have to cope.

Dusty Rhodes  12:50
How does that make you feel?

Alasdair Henderson  12:54
It's a huge mix of emotions. Again, I think engineers are trained to be very analytical and very pragmatic and get things going, even more so in contracting. So when something happens, it's full activity mode. Stop this change that make it safe. Do this. All the activity comes out around how you deal with the immediate aftermath of something, whether it's safety, whether it's technical, whatever it is to stabilise the situation, and then that period of reflection happens, and it happens at the same time as investigation and improvement and all those things, but the personal reflections that come from that, particularly around safety, build up. I won't say that on day one, when you've, you know, when you've the first day after an accident has happened and something you're responsible for, you're immediately changed. You are, but not in ways you recognise, but over a period of, you know, a few years of not very many of these things happening, but enough that it has that impact, you start to understand the nature of that responsibility and how that compares with some of the other responsibilities you have. There's a really interesting thing. So I became a I became a dad when I was Gosh, 28 or 29 something like that. And you know, prior to that, work was absolutely everything. The biggest problem I could think of as a work problem, all those sorts of things. And I now say to my staff, you know, until you've stood in a pediatric A and E at two o'clock in the morning with your child in the arms, you don't really know what a problem looks like. And after you've done that, then it gives you a different perspective, and it allows when something happens, say, an accident happens. My first question is, is anybody hurt? And if the answer to that is no, the rest we can deal with.

Dusty Rhodes  14:24
It's really interesting how you say there's a difference between managing a project as an engineer and then leading people. And it's something you seem to have come through kind of quite naturally, because as you are managing then you become a leader, something you didn't realise you can learn by experience, which is one way of doing things, but obviously it's better to learn from others experience before you, and to do some kind of, you know, kind of professional or personal development on on that were you able to learn about leading people as a result of those incidents and experiences that you had?

Alasdair Henderson  14:58
Yeah, and through both. The mechanisms that you've just mentioned there. So, you know, as an organisation, we've always done lots of very good individual development. Early Career Stage used to be very focused on technical development and leadership didn't come until later on. We've changed that a lot in the business now that leadership, as soon as people are being exposed to the idea that they are managing groups of people, we help them into leadership training, because it's such a positive impact and it makes such a difference. Commercially, in our business, it makes a huge difference, because you end up with better managers and better leaders before those individuals it, it accelerates the way they think about those things. But informally, and I think certainly my early career, that was the most profound thing. I had some really inspirational people that I worked with who without, without formally teaching about leading, or without even perhaps knowing that they were doing it through leading by example, visible leadership and just the way they conducted themselves and the humanity of them actually allowed you to recognise that this is a good way of doing things. I had a particular line manager, a chap called Ian Walz. She's retired now, but Ian, I still keep in regular contact. And I think Ian, I would say, allowed me to understand that you can run a big business, a complex business, like a contractor that has lots of commercial concerns, that has lots of activity going on all at once. You can do all of that without being a monster, without being a table banger. You can do that and still be a human being and that, if you know, I can pass on any lesson. That's the one I want to pass on to people humanity and being, you know, being authentic and true to yourself and true to human beings that you're working with is much, much more powerful than the whole command and control trying to tell people what to do. Most often when you try and tell people what to do, number one, they're a bit suspicious of it. And Number Number two, at least some of them don't do it. So it's really not a great method of how you get things done. I

Dusty Rhodes  16:50
think the point you're making about people and the importance of people is stuff that you don't really realize until you're, as you say, in the middle of a job, and there's all kinds of which you're very experienced that now with diversity and inclusion and all kinds of things, which I want to talk about later, but firstly, I want to just pivot and talk about BAM for a few minutes, because BAM Ireland is known for delivering ambitious projects across all kinds of sectors, and one of the biggest and most well known recently is The National Children's Hospital. Big projects like that always have changes. Can you tell me, firstly, how big is the National Children's Hospital project, and why is there always changes when it comes to these things?

Alasdair Henderson  17:31
So it's, it's one of the largest buildings in Europe. And I think perhaps some of the commentators on the project or on the outcomes the project, don't necessarily understand just what a scale a project. It is six and a half thousand rooms. You know it is. It is going to be the envy of not just European, but, you know, Western Hospital pediatric care across the world, really. It's, it's an extraordinary facility. It's a brilliant facility for Ireland, the whole island of Ireland. And it will transform pediatric care with a shadow of a doubt. But of course, it's not at that stage yet. It's at the stage where people see it as a project. They see it as government expenditure. And of course, they're quite rightly concerned about those things. I think, as you zoom out from that, and I've been involved with lots of major projects, you start to see patterns in some of them. And one of these patterns that you see around major projects, and let's not, you know, let's not apply this absolutely to Children's Hospital. It has its own particular features, but generally speaking, with major projects, one of the things you notice is that, and I'll be clear, major public funded infrastructure projects, they are, you know, they're huge, so they tend to only be affordable by governments, and immediately, then you have the value for money, public expenditure questions being asked, which takes you into political arena, and quite rationally, society are interested in that these projects are hugely complex. They are so complex that, in reality, being able to understand the scope and delivery at the start, before you've done anything, becomes almost impossible from a just from a sort of philosophical standpoint. They are so complex, and the complexity can't be seen until you're in amongst it. But of course, we have ways of dealing with that, and one of the ways of dealing with that is detailed, rigorous engineering planning. The more time you can spend on that before you start building, the better the outcomes are. And that's a lesson from major infrastructure construction everywhere. Unfortunately, that tends to conflict with a political desire that once you've got permission, planning authority, budget for doing something, you really want your start now shovels in the ground, Bill, build, build, because they the the political capital that comes from having started something, the visibility of starting something, and the public's need to see that progress is being made is a physical need rather than a, you know, rather than a sort of practical need. And so often these projects can be started before they are actually ready to start. And the result of that is that change happens as you go through the project. Again, I'm not going to say that specifically what's happened at Children's Hospital, but it's a thing that you see the other really. Interesting, recurring theme that happens with these major infrastructure projects that are hugely impactful on, you know, creation of opportunity in society, creation of wealth, provision of service, whatever it looks like. But the benefit is, once that benefit starts being provided the day you start treating a child in the Children's Hospital, everything that's gone before is forgotten. I mean, if I talk about Dublin, specifically, Port tunnel. Remember port tunnel? You look at infrastructure that deeply problematic and complex in its time, was an absolutely essential piece of infrastructure now Dublin, Dublin Airport, terminal two. You know, it's you wouldn't imagine Dublin airport without terminal two right now. But you know, another complex infrastructure project that had its own challenges.

Dusty Rhodes  20:41
I want to get back to this particular topic of public procurement because public procurement and contracting models is something you will be very familiar with, right Can I ask you, what is your view on identifying the best procurement model for Ireland, which is focusing not just on the cost, but on delivering the right outcomes for the country.

Alasdair Henderson  21:01
You've nailed it just in that sentence. Outcome focus is the thing that's here. Now, you know, Ireland's had all sorts of challenges, as every country has, in how you procure infrastructure effectively, and there's a lot of moving parts in that you've got. You know, how well funded is the country? How are you procuring that money? Is it Is it money that's in the treasury? Is it money that's coming from external financing? What's the risk appetite for the organisations that are delivering this? Because, you know, fundamentally, risk starts with the person who wants to develop it. If you want to, if you want to build a tunnel somewhere, let's say you want to build a tunnel for a metro system in Dublin, for example, right now, that's a government problem, and all the risk sits with the government. At some point, they'll contract to some organisation to do some construction, and the purpose of that contract is to pass risk. It's to deliver scope, but it's fundamentally a risk-sharing model, if you like. You ask somebody to do something, they commit to do it, and they take certain risks in doing that for a commercial price. That's changed a lot in the past. In past five years, actually, never mind the past 10 or 20 years that the level of risk associated with the business model of contracting has changed enormously, and the ability of contractors balance sheets to sustain that, or I'll put that a different way, the willingness of contractors to sustain those kind of risks on their balance sheets has reduced enormously. The construction industry knows very well what it's doing. It absolutely can deliver these projects well. And actually, Ireland is good at delivering these projects. There's a narrative that says we don't know how to do this in Ireland, not true. We do know how to do it. We just sometimes choose to do it in a way that is different, and you end up with the wrong outcome. But jumping back to what you want from this, anybody who's procuring fundamentally, they're looking for something around budget, something around program and something around the expected benefits. So let's call those outcomes. If a procurement model that you're currently using doesn't take you to those outcomes, then it can't be right. So single stage, lump sum contracting are offering up complex projects to say before you know, we conceptualise something for six years and put it out to the market for three months to have it priced, which is automatically a rush. And therefore, you know, information poor and time poor, tell me right now, without knowing anything about the future, what that's going to cost. And you can't charge me any more, by the way. You know, how do you expect that model to deliver a rational outcome. And that takes you to thing we call two stage contracting. The two stage contracting has unfortunately got a bit of a poor reputation in Ireland from a couple of implementations. It is, right now, the best way, and it's demonstrably the best way. And it does two things. You you have a first stage which is has to be competed for. So you have the market competition thing, but the first stage allows the customer and the contractor and other interested parties to work together, paid to work together, to develop the scope, the planning, the risk profile, and get to the end of the first stage, where the customer knows what it is that they're going to be paying for this that everybody has talked about what it is we're doing, that the design is fully developed, the risks are understood and properly allocated, and crucially, the scope alignment. So the understanding of what the customer thinks they're getting versus what the contractor thinks they're providing is perfect because you've been working collaboratively together to do it. If at that point, the customer says, this is the right answer, let's go. You move into phase two, and that's building the customer. Can also say, actually, having gone through all this detailed phase, I can see I don't want to do this. Or this isn't to you know, this isn't the right price. We need to do something else. Most commonly challenges that happen with construction. Or the reason that construction goes wrong is that the expectation of the customer and the and the belief from the contractor of what they're providing start misaligned, so at scope misalignment, and if you start with a misaligned scope, it never gets better. It just gets worse and worse and works. So, you know, it's a real challenge. One of the challenges that people throw at two stage contracting is, well, you do this first stage and that that just increases the cost these. Jobs, it's much more expensive because everything's getting lumped in there and adapt. What actually happens is it gives you a much closer view of what the likely outturn cost is. If you want to compare procurement methods, to say, give me your best guess of what you think is going to cost. So your best tender price for the start? Yes, you can compare those. You can compare those all day long, and you can go for lowest price, or you can go for some other most economically advantageous model. But that's just the price that's proposed at the start. It doesn't include anything that might happen, or anything you could foresee happening if you had a bit more time to spend on it. And it's certainly not a brilliant guide to what the outturn cost is going to be.

Dusty Rhodes  25:38
No so procurement is a complicated area. And as you say, it's about budget, and then it's about benefits. Another thing that I think you must be considering is sustainability, because it's a huge focus for for engineering today, and there's a lot of kind of rethinking and change going on in the construction industry around that. Bam says that it's committed to building a sustainable tomorrow. Sounds great. Lovely Little Yeah, very corporate explain to me, as a human being, exactly what that looks like and how it's being implemented.

Alasdair Henderson  26:12
So you'll have heard of net zero. Yeah, everybody talks about net zero. So this is about getting to a place where the carbon emissions of the way we live our lives have there's no net emissions of carbon. There might be some emissions of carbon, but there's something else that offsets them. If you understand it, 39 40% of carbon emissions come from the construction or operation of the built environment, whether that's infrastructure buildings, the house you live in, the way you heat your house, the way you travel. 39 to 40% of anthropogenic CO two emissions come from that if you can't deal with the built environment, which is the construction industry, then you just can't get to anything, to net anything. So you have to deal with the way that construction traditionally gets done, and the way we operate, the built environment, the buildings we have, and the infrastructure we use. So very straightforwardly, there's two parts to that. There is the capital build phase. That's the bit that I suppose I'm very involved in as a contracting business. What does it cost? What do we emit in doing these things? And then there's the operational phase. What does it cost to run your building, power, water heating, particularly the operational phase is very strongly guided by how the facilities are designed. How are they designed to operate. So things like putting an air source heat pump into your house or into your building, instead of a gas boiler or an oil found boiler, zoom out to building scale. You know the kind of buildings you see in central cork, central Dublin, central Galway, big, impressive buildings, and of course, they are heated in different ways. Efficiency is important. How they're insulated, things like lighting, making sure that the lighting is efficient and well designed. Energy consumption, water consumption, trying to limit the use of water. There's some other interesting aspects in sustainability as well that aren't just about consumption, but the way that the building deals with the environment. So we we take a green field and we turn it into something hard and concrete or aluminum or whatever. When rain hits that it runs straight off it and into the into the drainage system. Instead of soaking gently into a field. When rain hits a field, the water flow is attenuated. It's slowed down. When rain hits a building, it's speeded up and it rushes down into the surgeon. Get these flood surges that happen. So now, when we design buildings, just as a case in point, we've done one in southern Dublin, we have what's called a blue roof, so it has a green roof. You're probably familiar with that, a roof that looks sort of grassy. It's actually a different kind of plant. It's not grass, but it looks nice. It's not like a hard roof. So water comes into that, but beneath that, we also have a water storage layer so it attenuates the rainfall. It doesn't just hit the building. It goes straight into down pipes. It hits the building and is slowed down so that the peak flows in the outfall into the sewer are much, much slower. Come back to the construction phase. It just, just to be absolutely, uh, sort of final point in this, the construction phase. One of the biggest things you see in civil engineering construction is diesel being burned to construct these things. You know, big equipment fueled by diesel plumes of smoke. CO two emissions. Two years ago, I switched our business to using hydro-treated vegetable oil, certified hydro treated vegetable oil. That's a that's a really important distinction. So this is not HBO that comes from palm oil or or first virgin sources, if you like. It's comes from used waste oils that recycled to make a fuel that has a huge impact on our CO two emissions that come from from liquid fuels. The thing that everybody's doing our car fleet. So we have a fairly big car fleet, three or 400 cars, moving those over to EV over a period of three years. By the end of 2026 our fleet will be 100% EV. So you know, we really are stopping doing the things that we said we would still do.

Dusty Rhodes  29:43
Also on planning projects, while we're talking about these things, how is BAM handling the challenge of supporting biodiversity that may be interrupted by sites

Alasdair Henderson  29:52
biodiversity is one of the most interesting, most productive challenges for us. Actually, it is. It's really hard to measure, so we don't yet have a great. Measure of what improvement in biodiversity is in a, you know, purely numerical sense, but conceptually and qualitatively, you can absolutely see it. So imagine what you you know, if you imagine the motorway, what a motorway looks like, and how the in the engineering profession says this is how a motorway should look. You know, it's strips of tarmac and at the side, sometimes you're in a cutting where you've got slopes going up from you, and sometimes you're on an embankment where you've got slopes going down from you. So you have this alignment of the road, and it doesn't just follow the land. It cuts through the land, sometimes cutting, sometimes embankment. And you'll Picture those embankments and those cuttings, and you'll see long planar surfaces that are covered in grass, the same kind of grass. And it's very neat. It's very geometric. Is exactly how an engineer would draw this. This is, this is what good practice looks like. Make it neat, make it tidy. It's easy to maintain, easy to construct. So from engineering standpoint, that's been best practice for many, many years. And from a biodiversity standpoint, it's catastrophic. It's monocultural grasses, the roads and indeed, Rails, long, linear infrastructure is a real problem, because it interrupts, interrupts the movement of animals. So animals that are naturally migratory are animals that are territorial. So as they produce offspring, have to expand their space. These long bits of linear infrastructure block that. So what do you do about it? Well, there's a few things you can start using, things like green tunnels. It's just one solution, but it's a solution where you allow these spaces, green tunnels and green bridges at these crossing points at regular intervals on long linear infrastructure to allow natural migration of animals. But you look at those long linear slopes, those planar slopes with monocultural grasses on them, what we actually need there is some decay and decomposition. Positive decay and decomposition now saying those words and the word positive in the same sentence sounds nuts, but it's that is how nature works, that you need that you don't want to be cutting the grass all the time. You want trees that fall over and rot and they support insect life and they create nutrients and all those sorts of things. So the way that we manage those landscapes changed. Don't make a mistake of thinking they're not managed. This is people are it's very popular to talk about rewilding as a solution. Rewilding is just another way of managing a landscape. These are now managed landscapes, and we have to deal with them. If you look at the global biodiversity loss, and you look at a map of that, the Ireland and the UK are in the bottom 10% the most biodiversity, the most sort of loss of natural biodiversity across the globe, largely through land use. This is about how we've set up our infrastructure, but also how we use the land that we've turned over to farming. This is not farming as bad. This is just we have to find ways to manage the landscape in a different way that support all the things we need as a society, infrastructure and farming amongst them, but also all the things we need in order to continue. What are we doing as a business? Well, we're starting to feed this into the way we design these projects, the way we conceptualize them, the way we advise customers about them, and the kinds of things we leave behind through our monocultural landscapes, more active biodiversity, where we manage motorways, and we do plenty of that in Ireland, thinking about the way that we manage verge cutting and things like that. Less of it allow wildlife to grow, allow plant life to grow, variations in plant life, even sometimes things you know that are a little bit twee, but you know, bug hotels and beehives and things like that all make an important impact. But the biggest single thing we can do is change what we think the best practice in constructing long, linear infrastructure looks like.

Dusty Rhodes  33:22
Let me get away from the environment and back to people. And one thing I hear over and over again on the podcast is about engineering and diversity and inclusion within the industry, from your point of view. Why is it important?

Alasdair Henderson  33:39
Well, you know we we are of society and in society as an organisation. If you honestly believe that we can construct the right things for society in the right way and not include the viewpoints and contributions from part of society, whatever that part looks like, whether it's gender, race, whatever it is, then you're kidding yourself when you look at the way the infrastructure is designed. And let me, let me give you an example around public transport. If you are like you and I are, you know, a white male of a certain age, confident in our space, the world has been designed around us. So the world has been designed to suit us because it's been designed by people like us and built by people like us to be operated. So when you walk into a, I don't know, a railway station in Dublin, or you're sitting in Kent station in Cork, or Kent station down in Galway, which we are rebuilding, by the way, you're standing there, it's an environment that you're completely comfortable with. If you're standing there at 10 o'clock on a Friday night, and it's not terribly well lit, and there's not very many people around, and you're a woman, you've probably got a different experience with that. You've certainly got a different experience of that. And how can we deal with that? Well, that is an environment that's been created by engineering design. You can absolutely make those environments safer, warmer, more welcoming by changing the way you design that infrastructure. And unless you've got. Insight at design stage and at construction stage, then you're not going to build the right thing that works for the rest of society.

Dusty Rhodes  35:07
So this is why you're saying we need a more diverse people included in the industry, at the design site, in engineering, because they will bring these different perspectives, and the projects will be better as a result.

Alasdair Henderson  35:20
Exactly that. Let me give you another example. You're wandering around city centre cork. Somebody's doing some work on something. They've put a hoarding up. It's blocked off a bit of the pavement, so you have to step off the pavement into a temporary walkway. Now, you and I can manage that. You know, we're able-bodied. We can walk and all the rest of it. If you're a wheelchair user, if you've got a buggy if you know, if you are not of that group, then that just that simple change has a really profound impact on the quality of your life that day, or your or actually your ability to do something. Those insights are necessary for how we think about infrastructure, even a temporary sense. And then, of course, from a from a business perspective, this is dead, dead obvious. You know, even if you don't believe the moral case for including people in your business. We are sitting here in Ireland with basically full employment bar structural factors. So we have not just a skills crisis, but a total availability of population crisis. Is the Civil Engineering and Construction Industry sufficiently attractive that people are rushing towards it? No, not really. So we need to make sure that we have access to all of the people, the potential talent that could come into our business, and make sure that they feel that this is a welcoming environment for them to come to and stay.

Dusty Rhodes  36:29
Do you think there are kind of preconceptions then about how engineering works that's creating barriers?

Alasdair Henderson  36:36
Oh, yeah, absolutely. When we do when we do student placements or school placements, one of the things we try and do is get the parents in on day one, because more often than not, the parents are hugely influential in how children choose careers or feel about a certain industry. And often the parents have a view of construction. If they're not exposed to construction or infrastructure, indeed, engineering, more broadly, directly, they tend to have a view on it that is sometimes a bit dirty. It's about manufacturing, or it's about digging holes and stuff, and it looks a bit I don't really want my daughter to go there. And then you bring them along and you show them the the really high-quality professionals that we have within our business, the money, amount of money we spend on incredibly productive, modern equipment, the use of digitalisation. I mean, it's, it's Minecraft, RIT, big, if you like. And the parents see this, and they see the care and attention, sophistication, understanding and the support of culture around what we do. And I have to say that parents absolutely love our industry when they see it, and they're very happy for to say, you know, my daughter, my son, yeah, go do your placement there. But before that, contact, yes, there's absolutely preconceived notions around mucky, dirty, you know, not very nice industry.

Dusty Rhodes  37:45
Listen. Let me wrap up our chat today by talking about something we love. Talking about the podcast, the future from your point of view, though, looking towards the future, how do you see engineering evolving in the next 10 years?

Alasdair Henderson  38:00
Well, look, we're sitting here today. There is a force 11 storm across Ireland. We've just come through a Christmas period where one of the principal freight transport links came out of action. You start to understand that Ireland is in a place where it's its infrastructure is fragile, and the infrastructure that supports the rest of society needs attention, needs to be built. And on top of that, when you look at the challenges that Ireland as a country faces, and the world generally faces, these extreme weather events that are challenging the infrastructure that we have now, buildings, you know, where the cooling systems aren't enough to keep them cool in the peaks of summer heat, railways, where we have the rails that buckle in the peaks of summer, heat, cold weather snaps that freeze and land snow on us that we can't clear for a week. Those kinds of events are coming now, and they're coming more regularly, and our infrastructure is not shaped through it. So we need to update the infrastructure we've got, and we need to new build, new infrastructure that helps society work. And the positive around this is you can see this also from the way that government policy is shaped around it. Is shaped around this. People really now understand the value of that infrastructure and how it creates opportunity and employment for a future Ireland. So I would say, if you're thinking about coming into engineering, generally, construction, specifically, it is probably the most important 50 years coming in construction that there has ever been when you look at the challenges that the world has to deal with. We are the organisations. We are the industry almost uniquely that has the capability to deal with that.

Dusty Rhodes  39:29
It's happening, and it's changing so fast that the next 10 years is going to be particularly important. Aside from that, on the technology side of things, you know, we've got aI everybody's talking about, you've got more and more and more use of robots and stuff like that. Are you excited by any of those new technologies?

Alasdair Henderson  39:44
Oh, hugely. And you they're making a big impact in our industry already, efficiency, effectiveness that we've gone through quite a long period of productivity not really enhancing. And then you start to see how some of these automation techniques are really enhancing our productivity, and whether that is modularisation for house building. I. Whether that is about much clever, more expensive capital equipment that we buy, but it's much more productive, and therefore it's worth it. You know, those things are changing. What you will definitely see in construction over the coming years is there will be fewer people in construction, which is, it's a bit like the the Genesis that farming went through. It becomes more productive, and it's not because it doesn't mean that fewer people are employed in the industry. What happens is there is a bigger industry because it's able to do more. So by increasing our productivity, we get away from some of the skill challenges that mean that we just need more people to do things and with the people we've got, but we do need people, let's be clear, but with the people we've got, we can do even more. It's a huge opportunity. And digitalisation is just extraordinary. What we do now compared with even five years ago, absolutely amazing.

Dusty Rhodes  40:46
And my favourite expression is when you look at these new technologies, you have to remember that this is the worst they will ever be. What about Finally, on materials? Because materials are changing all the time. Lots of innovation. There have you seen any that excite you?

Alasdair Henderson  41:02
Yeah, and we're actually doing a lot in that space. So concrete and steel, our industry is addicted to concrete and steel, both very, very high embedded carbon content with content materials. And of course, if we want to get to net zero, we're going to have to do something around that. So one of the technologies we've been working on biocarbonisation, it is about how you treat the ground in situ using bacteria. I'm not going to bore you about it now, but it's an extraordinary use of natural resource that you can use bacteria to improve the strength of the ground. So instead of doing that traditional construction thing of digging a hole, dumping the soil and then filling the whole field of concrete, you can actually treat the soil so it's got a higher strength and is more usable as a construction material, but we must start using more effectively, ceramics, fiber based materials. Get away from our absolute addiction to concrete and steel. Aviation has been doing this for many, many years. The materials are well understood. They absolutely have application in civil engineer.

Dusty Rhodes  41:55
Last question for you, Alistair, and a little bit of advice for everybody who's listening today. You've got a very interesting point of view on what engineers should be interested in. Explain to me.

Alasdair Henderson  42:07
So I when I talk to people about the things that they should be developing in their career. And of course, you do get lots of people come and say, How do I get your job? You know, how do I become like you? Not many actually, but people who want to progress in their careers. And the thing I say to them, I suppose, is a little bit surprising, but the thing I value most is bread, and that's for a few reasons. You know, breadth of understanding of the world that you're working in. As I say, we are in society and of society, if you don't understand it, then the decisions you make around how you do things will not be good decisions.

Dusty Rhodes  42:37
So you're talking breadth, breadth, yeah. So, all right, yeah, maybe the Scottish, Scottish accent sounds like bread. You see the toast? Sorry, the breath, yeah. And that's, you

Alasdair Henderson  42:47
know, that's everything that is. It's culture, it's society. Why do we do the things we do? Why we talk? Why do we exist? Philosophy, you know, philosophy. You should absolutely be interested in philosophy, understanding what it is, where we've come from, where we're going. Those things might not sound like engineering, but they change your perspectives, in your Outlook, and help you deal, help you engage with stakeholders who are relying on you to do good work and help them meet their requirements. All of that feeds into a sort of critical thinking mode, if you one of the challenges that we have in the modern world is lack of critical thinking, and it often comes from an inability to see perspectives from other people, if you if you work to improve your bread, apart from being interesting and self-fulfilling anyway, it also allows you to be a better critical thinker, because you are able to see and understand more perspectives. Helps you reduce your, you know, Availability Heuristic biases. It helps you reduce your confirmation biases, all those things that constrain critical thinking, and goodness knows, we could do with so much more critical thinking in the modern world.

Dusty Rhodes  43:50
What a fantastic point of view to wrap up on. If you'd like to find out more about Alasdair and some of the topics that we've spoken about today, you'll find notes and link details in the description area of the podcast. But for now Alasdair Henderson, Executive Director of BAM Ireland. Thank you so much for joining us. 

Alasdair Henderson  44:06
Thanks, Dusty. It's been a pleasure.

Dusty Rhodes  44:08
If you enjoyed our podcast today, do share with a friend in the business. Just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland for advanced episodes and more information on career development opportunities. There are libraries of information on our website at https://www.engineersireland.ie/Resources/Amplified

Until next time from myself, Dusty Rhodes, thank you for listening. 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/debra-f-laefer-09510a11/

MORE INFORMATION
Looking for ways to explore or advance a career in the field of engineering? Visit Engineers Ireland to learn more about the many programs and resources on offer. https://www.engineersireland.ie/  

Engineers Journal AMPLIFIED is produced by DustPod.io for Engineers Ireland.

QUOTES
"We didn't devise a sensor, we didn't even improve the sensor, but we took a fundamentally engineering approach to it. We took this more systematic approach of; let's reverse engineer the process, figure out what we want to get and figure out how to use the sensor to obtain that data."  - Dr. Debra Laefer

"This technique has been used in fields as far from civil engineering as breast cancer research. So that not only has it been transferred to other LIDAR applications, but people have used it for other remote sensing and medical imaging datasets." - Dr. Debra Laefer

"It's good to make mistakes, and it's good to have senior engineers check them." - Dr. Debra Laefer

"As crazy as your idea may seem, a lot of the time the best ideas are initially too far ahead of the curve, so don't give up on them." - Dr. Debra Laefer

KEYWORDS
#buildings #data #dublin #engineers #civilengineering #lidar #computationalmodel

TRANSCRIPTION
For your convenience, we include an automated AI transcription

Dusty Rhodes  00:00
Right now on AMPLIFIED, we're about to find out how to make a 3D scan of Dublin.

Debra Laefer  00:05
If people think they have a good idea, they shouldn't give up, that if you push on it hard enough long enough, it will happen. As crazy as your idea may seem, and a lot of times the best ideas are initially too far ahead of the curve. But don't give up on it.

Dusty Rhodes  00:24
Hi there. My name is Dusty Rhodes and welcome to AMPLIFIED the Engineers Journal podcast. We're very familiar with the BIM and LiDAR in civil engineering but how far can you go with those technologies? Could you apply them to a full city and still get millimetre level accuracy. Our guest today is behind the world's densest urban aerial laser scanning dataset, which was conducted using a large slice of the centre of Dublin City. She is a pioneering force in urban data science, addressing the challenge of handling massive amounts of information collected by drones, satellites and laser measurements, and then using smart ways to store search and turn that data into useful visuals. She is a qualified civil engineer, has authored over 160 peer reviewed publications, been awarded four patents, worked as a professor in UCD Dublin, and is currently serving as a professor at New York University's Centre for Urban science and Progress. I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Debra Laefer to the podcast. How are you, Debra?

Debra Laefer  01:24
Great, thanks so much for having me.

Dusty Rhodes  01:26
It's a delight to have you with us. Before we get into the world's densest LiDAR data set, which you generated here in Ireland, you had a very interesting route into engineering, you had a kind of an art history degree and then got into civil engineering. What, tell me the story behind that.

Debra Laefer  01:43
So I fell in love with painting and old buildings and decided I wanted to become an art historian. So I applied to the best program in the United States and got admitted to Columbia University. And as part of this, I gotten involved with creating a student art gallery. So this was supposed to be a place for students and faculty and alumni could show their own artworks. And then we were informed that we had to temporarily move out of space, because they were going to do construction through it to put in some new telecom lines. So this was back in the mid late to late 80s. And I was concerned because it was a historic building. So I started asking around, started doing some investigation, and found out that not only was the district building, but it had been damaged. In fact, it had been damaged the last time they did construction near it, so called the Landmarks Preservation people to confirm that yes, the building was protected. We reached out to a people at the historic preservation program at Columbia University. And they put me in touch with one of their students who is a civil engineer. And I was so impressed with this, this young woman, her name is Marie Ennis, she's actually still a practising engineer here in New York City. And that she could combine this large toolbox of thoughts and knowledge and conveyed in a way that was meaningful to people in practice. And I was very, I think, influenced by that. And over the next few months, I started thinking, well, if I really love old buildings, maybe this is what I want to do, maybe I need to be come a civil engineer. So there I was finishing my last year in my Bachelors of Arts degree in art history. And starting my first year in my Bachelors of Engineering and civil engineering. And ultimately, I persevered with this, I been worked in the construction industry, at a time where it was it was pretty rough, a lot of organised crime, a lot of violence on the sides. It was a pretty exciting time in New York construction. But I really was happy doing that. And I thought, Oh, well, you know, I feel like I still don't know enough. So we're going to start a master's program at night part time. And as part of that, I met some amazing people in the geotechnical engineering realm. So that's a division of civil engineering. And a lot of them surprisingly, had PhDs. And they were in the midst of really important a lot of amazing technologies from Europe, into the United States, things that were very well suited to protect existing structures when you did excavation or drilling or blasting or de watering, or tunnelling near them. So I finished my master's degree I applied and got a Fulbright to Italy, I spent a year at the Polytechnic of Milan, really studying brick masonry and its vulnerabilities and then I came back to the US, and I took my PhD and Geotechnics. But I had also the opportunity to do some travelling as part of that research. And we went to Korea, and I got a chance to come over to the UK, and to spend some time, particularly some people from McDonald, looking at the Jubilee line. So at the time, this was the most expensive tunnelling project that had ever happened, it was about, I think, 2 billion pounds. And about 25% of this was being spent either on predicting which buildings were going to move, monitoring them, or, you know, kind of free tunnelling intervention where they were pumping grout under the ground, in particular, under Big Bend. And despite this huge investment, a lot of buildings did get damaged. So when we spoke to the engineers, who simply what kind of great computational Shanell models are you using to predict which buildings are going to get damaged, and they said, Oh, we don't use the computational models at home, what's wrong with them? And they said, No, because there's nothing wrong with the model. But we do not have documentation of all of the above ground buildings. Many of these buildings date back hundreds and hundreds of years, and to go out and to survey each building, and then convert to generate drawings. And then to convert that into a computational model would be impossible for the hundreds and hundreds of buildings that are along this tunnel route. So instead, we're using a fairly simplistic set of numerical equations that date back mostly to the 50s, but then kind of improved in the early 70s. So here we are, we're pushing the turn of the millennium. And we're using stuff that's at least 30, if not 40 years old.

Dusty Rhodes  06:53
So that I understand it, you find yourself in London, and you have all of this tunnelling going on, they can't correctly tunnel because they can't do the computations for all of the buildings because it's just too big an area.

Debra Laefer  07:07
It's not that they can't tunnel if they can tunnel but it at greater risk to the structures than need be.

Dusty Rhodes  07:14
So, you said to yourself, aha, here's a problem. I'm gonna come up with a solution for this.

Debra Laefer  07:20
Not quite, I just went home and thought, Wow, I'm surprised this is a problem. Yeah. So I went, I bet back, I finished my degree. And about two, three years later, I had just finished, I had moved to North Carolina to become a young faculty member. And 911 happened. And having spent many years in New York studying and working, having Mitch family there. My parents were born there. My grandparents were born there, many people from our families still live there. It was a very disturbing and moving kind of time. And I was very interested in what they were doing, how they were trying to do the rescuing, because I'd been involved with some kind of post disaster earthquake work while I was also at the university. So it was kind of a little tied into the emergency management community at that point. And I started to learn about a fellow named Dave Bloomquist, who is a faculty member down at the University of Florida in Gainesville. And his work with NOAA, and the work that they did to basically put up a small plane, and to do heat detection and LIDAR over the World Trade Centre disaster zone, so that it could help them both figure out where there might be fires happening underground still, and how to start to remove debris at that point, they already realised that there are no survivors. So but it started looking at these 3d models, or 3d representations using this LIDAR data. And I thought, wow, that's really interesting. And about four months later, I was up in New York, and I had an opportunity to work to get to know an engineer who was really helping coordinate a lot of that removal, and had the opportunity to actually go down into the site. So this is like January 2 2002. And the site is still on fire. Even with a gas mask, it was very hard to go through. But I'm looking around and I'm seeing you know, these buildings on the damage and thinking about the work that Bloomquist did, and I said, No, no, maybe we could use LIDAR to document all these structures. So I called him up and he was very generous and he helped share some of experience and help get my group started and we started doing some work in this area. And we started doing some work for the owner Emergency Management Agency. Looking at prediction have trees falling across roadways, where we would go and MIT from the LIDAR they already had, we could measure the height of the tree and the distance to the road and make estimates to what extent if the tree fell over, it would either partially, completely or not at all block the road. So that was kind of our first foray into that. And once I started, I was completely locked.

Dusty Rhodes  10:25
Okay, so now, it sounds like you are looking for data over huge areas of land and very highly populated land, with a lot of buildings in it. That's a huge amount of information that you need LIDAR piqued your attention. For engineers who are not working in this space. Can you explain how that technology works? How do you 3d scan an area?

Debra Laefer  10:48
Yeah, so it's a technology that can be used from multiple platforms from even right now through your iPhone, or from some type of stationary unit, the unit can be mounted on a car, it could be a small lens mounted on drones, on helicopters on airplanes, the technology is fundamentally the same, you're sending out a laser signal, kind of a beam of light, you know, what time it left your piece of equipment.

Dusty Rhodes  11:27
And you know, where kind of in the world your equipment is, is it on the ground? Is it above is it at the bottom of the broad of a craft.

Debra Laefer  11:29
So, that beam part of it will come back, it will hit something and it will come back. And you will know and the equipment will record the time that it comes back. So based on the change in time, we have a certain distance that can be calculated because we know what the speed of light is. And we use that to determine what they call the range.

Dusty Rhodes  11:52
And you were doing this millions and millions. And it's I imagine millions and millions of times a second.

Debra Laefer  11:58
Yeah, I mean, ultimately, obviously some of its limited by your equipment, but it's actually more limited by the how much data the equipment can take back. And how long your battery is good for.

Dusty Rhodes  12:15
Let's put a picture on it. Okay, you somehow found yourself in Dublin and you decided Grafton Street. Okay, we're going to 3d scan that we're gonna measure that down to what kind of measurement Did you get it down to what scale?

Debra Laefer  12:28
The first scan we did was about four centimetres. Wow. Okay. And the second I think was down to about two and a half centimetres. Wow. So tell me maybe a actually even less than that. So made that a centimetre.

Dusty Rhodes  12:47
Tell me about this story about how you use helicopters, drones, whatever centre of Dublin Grafton Street, the whole block and you measured it and 3d scanner to within a centimetre.

Debra Laefer  12:57
So what we really wanted to do was to provide these representations of these buildings to the engineering community. So you have to set your mind back to 2004. Celtic Tiger, Ireland's booming, and a lot of discussion about putting in Dublin's first metro to go from the bottom of Grafton Street, or more specifically, in the northwest corner of St. Stephen's Green, yeah, up to the airport. So Dublin, and Ireland, in general, at that point had had almost no tunnelling. And obviously, here we are in a country that has limited experience with this technology, you have a very complicated geology with a lot of small, granular material mixed in with kind of big boulders and stuff. So it's a tough thing to tunnel through without a lot of disturbance of the ground. And here you have this amazing architectural resource in terms of the centre of Dublin, that at that moment was actually under consideration as a World Heritage Site. So you have this kind of conflict happening about preserving and the future and at risk. So I was fortunate put together a proposal to science foundation Ireland, with a colleague at UC Dublin, Hamish Carr and a colleague up at our collaborator up at Trinity, we were able to come up with kind of a plan of not only how to acquire this data, but how to process it and make it usable.

Dusty Rhodes  14:39
Okay, tell me about acquiring it.

Debra Laefer  14:40
So, when most people even today, put this kind of unit under a plane or a drone or helicopter, it faces down so the unit swings, and depending on the equipment, it might swing thing, just left to right. Or it may have kind of an arc to it. But it's kind of, you know, it's not just capturing exactly what's below it, but kind of a swath, but it's pretty much focused on what's directly underneath. And as the LIDAR unit swings to the side, the quality and quantity of data that you get, when it intersects a building facade is pretty limited. So most of the good data that you're getting is roads, and roofs. But if the thing that you're interested in knowing about and protecting is the building's facade and its structure, knowing about its roof and knowing about the street next to it's not going to help very much. So we kind of took a big step back, and Hamish and I really like, Well, how do we capture these building facades? And we said, well, let's let's think about the equipment, how does the equipment work? And how do they traditionally fly? Even though old kind of medieval city, like Dublin has a kind of pattern to it. And much of it's a grid. So typically, what they do is they say, Okay, we're gonna fly from x to y, and from A to B, this is our kind of area, and they will fly along the grid line, they'll go down, turn around, back down, back. And then when they're finished with that, they'll come around 90 degrees and do it the other way. It's great for the pilots, they really get lost, it's not so great for the data acquisition for the con, we watched you. So we show through geometry that if you flew diagonal, to the street grid, that you could pick up significant like basically double the information, just because the angle, just because the angle, the other thing we realised is that the amount of overlap that they fly was only enough to basically sew together, you know, one group of data from the next. So when you're flying down one street, they would go over, they wouldn't necessarily do the next street, that they would position themselves so that there was only about a 10% overlap. So if you're from the geomatics community, and you're interested in mapping, and you're interested in floodplain, or using this for floodplain risk analysis, this is great. But if you're interested in looking at these facades, it's not so great. And it basically really limits what you can pick up, because it's in that swing at the edge of the scan, that we're picking up the facades, right, because we're looking down, we're looking at the street, and now we're swinging to the left. And only at the end of that swing, do we start picking up the data. So again, we went back to basic geometry, and established that we needed about a 60% overlap, to achieve a complete scan so that we didn't have these is good blank spots, because you have with this line of sight technology, if you can't see it, you can't capture it, like the camera. So you have a situation if you're in front of one, if you're standing in front of a building, you obviously can't see what's on the back. But also, sometimes buildings preclude you seeing a building behind them. So if you're up in the air, and you've got a tallest building, and maybe there's a small one across the street, maybe you can't see that. So again, we had to kind of compensate for a lot of these things. When we originally did this, people thought we were insane. They're like, why do you want to do this, you know, like, trust us trust us. And it was very hard to even find a contractor to do it. And when we got the data, they were astonished. They're like, Wow, we had no idea we could get this kind of data.

Dusty Rhodes  19:08
Let me just say that there is a YouTube video of the data that you got. And when you watch the video, your jaw will drop and go, Oh, my God. And I have put a link directly to that video in the show notes in the description area of this podcast that we're listening to right now. So you can just click on it. And you can see it. Apologies, Deborah go on.

Debra Laefer  19:28
No, thank you. I think that's one of the best demonstrations of it. Because we're taking we didn't devise a sensor. We didn't even improve the sensor. But we took a fundamentally engineering approach to it. So I think that the way the technology had been used this idea was like more data is better and you just get we can you smash it together and you kind of muddle through the best you can. And we took this more systematic approach of let's reverse engineer the process. fear what we want to get and figure out how to use the sensor to obtain that data.

Dusty Rhodes  20:06
So now you have the data, what the problem is, is that you have an enormous amount of data. And that's the next problem. The next challenge, what do you do with it? I mean, how do you sort? Those many ones and zeros? Yeah.

Debra Laefer  20:22
So the basic storage of it, the I would call the static store, it's just, you know, putting it somewhere is not so much a problem. My brother used to work for Google, and he would joke, you know, what's a petabyte between friends? So it's not the storage, it's, as you said, it's the sorting. It's the what they call the queering. It's the retrieving of the data. And so we really, with my help, my long term colleague and collaborator Michela Berta loto, at UCD, really sat down and looked at a lot of the work that she had done in database and database structures, and talked about, well, what were our needs? How is the community currently doing at least some of this work? And what was that opportunity. And so in about 2006, we really started in earnest, taking on that problem. And I would say that that work really culminated about nine years later, when we graduated, jointly drew graduated a PhD student who demonstrated that you could very effectively use the data structure as the fundamental building block for post processing algorithms. So that you already have stored the data in a way that is highly usable. The paper that on jeuveau are joins graduate student who is still in Ireland is the lead author on is in the top point, zero 1% of all papers cited. For the years published, this technique has been used in fields as far from civil engineering as breast cancer research, so that not only has it been transferred to other LIDAR applications, but people have used it for other remote sensing and medical imaging datasets. So which is really amazing.

Dusty Rhodes  22:24
So you put some banners on the data, then how do you integrate it with other technologies? So a lot of people talk about GIS and bi M and stuff like that? How do you get that data then interacting with them? So engineers can actually use it? 

Debra Laefer  22:37
Yeah, I'd say actually, most of the ways that us engineers use it reaction, computational models. So certainly, there are ways to tie it to GIS systems, the time we were working, there wasn't even a full 3d solution, which meant that it was what they call two and a half d solution, which means that every Z point, every elevation point, there could only be one unique one for every xy point. So if you had a building that was truly straight, there was no way at that x, y point, you know, at that corner of your street, or the corner of your building, to represent both the bottom and the top. So you had this kind of slightly wedding cake effect, where the points were actually slightly offset. Obviously, the technology has moved on from now, these GIS systems can both produce and host 3d models. But to just to give you a sense of kind of where we were, you know, with us BIM kind of really wasn't even really a thing by then. And the challenge is, is that unlike a photograph, when you have a photograph, and you look at it, every pixel, every little space is filled, right? There's no blank spots. With the LIDAR data. It's not that way. Maybe the beam went through a window, and it didn't come back or you know, maybe it went through a tree and you it came back in like six different pieces. So you get this data set that's very non homogeneous. These often refer to a sparse, it's an ordered. So there's not no, there's no natural order, when you get it back from the vendor. mean, it's been geo referenced. But there's, it doesn't like say, Oh, this point belongs to a building. And this other point belongs to a building.

Dusty Rhodes  24:30
It's a bit scattered.

Debra Laefer  24:31
It's a bit scattered. It's a bit chaotic. So So we continue to pioneer really groundbreaking work in how to fundamentally store that data. Because very early on, it became clear that the sheer size of the data, it was a major impediment to people using it. And it's still content used to be so some of my most recent work that we've not published yet, really looks at how do you take a billion points and process them actually Just on a regular PC, you know, can you do that? So, for us, the bigger question was, how do you get these points into a computational model? We don't care, we're labelling them necessarily, may eventually want to label them to a certain extent, because you want to know if your material model for each piece is correct. But the bigger thing is, how do you generate what they call a watertight model. And this is where the 3d printing starts to sneak in. So to do a computational model, you have to do create what they call a watertight mesh, which means that every point has to be connected to other points through a set of lines, but these lines must connect at nodes, they can't overlap, they can't be a little short of them, right. And when you use the traditional transfer transformation processes that were available for ticket in the late 2000s, you ended up having to do a huge amount of manual correction. And if you're looking at a terabyte of data, that's not gonna work, right. Yeah. So we really had to kind of think about how do you overcome those problems. And through this wonderful kind of collaboration between computer science and through civil engineering that we had going on at UCD, between myself and Hamish Carr and our students, Tommy Hanks, and Lynch ronghong, we had this kind of Eureka moment that the way the computational models were set up, many of them used would look like almost a little bricks, that they were these eight noted elements, and that these eight nodes had no elements, which didn't have to be squares, that could be rectangles looked an awful like, the elements that we were using to do the storage axis that this is acting like a key is that, yeah,

Debra Laefer  27:02
in this, so we divided the data in something called an octree. So we're you chop it up into basically eight quadrants. And if there's no data in the quadrant, you forget about that part. And then you keep kind of digging down either until you only have a certain amount of points in a box. Maybe that's the amount of points that can be stored in the computer's cache and dealt with comfortably. Or maybe you do it more generically. And say you're just going to do you know, five divisions of these things. We realise that the octree and the computation model in the finite element, they looked a lot like so then we came up with two really pioneering algorithms to do that transformation. So as we were thinking about watertight, so what is starting to happen, the patents for the original 3d printers are expiring, and we're starting to see this boom of three. So actually, this is about 2012 2013. Starting to see this boom of home 3d printers, or the you know, low low in 3d printers. There's 3d printers this 3d printed that people are even talking about maybe can you 3d print a house, you know, all these things that people are now really excited the same way? Everybody's talking about AI now. So if you cast yourself back to 2013, everybody started with 3d printing through their predict 3d printed clothing and hats, and, and, and, and everything. How do we start saying, Well, if we're creating this watertight model, couldn't we use that same watertight model approach for 3d printing, because that's what you need. The input files for 3d printing have to be these watertight models. So there was an opportunity to apply for a competitive commercialisation type grant through the EU. At that point, I had received the European Research Council Award, which was the single largest single PI award that you could obtain at that time. And they had a program they wanted to really try to commercialise work. So you could then say, Okay, this piece of work came from his project. And we'd now like to try to commercialise it. So went through that competitive program, and we got a good amount of money. And we said, Okay, we have this wonderful used 3d printer, commercial grade metal 3d printer that we were able to acquire. And it quickly became apparent that this is a very expensive thing to run. It requires a huge amount of knowledge that you have to keep in the group. And we said, how are we going to sustain this? So we said, well, there's no 3d printing centres in Ireland. What if we just opened one, and that's that so that was our next big adventure. And we started to acquire other funding and other equipment and we really, you know, kind of graduated a whole class of people who then went on many of them to really lead the introduction of what are called Advanced Manufacturing in Ireland, including a guy named Brian Marin, who came to us off the dole through a, you know, train to work program. And it was so successful, that Brian became the main initial technician for the first National Advanced Manufacturing Centre. So I think, a real success.

Dusty Rhodes  30:31
Let me put this into some kind of a context, then on the engineering and design side of things because of our use of BIM. And we're used to digital twins, and you're able to play around the buildings and change things and see how it looks. How can you do that? Like, can you use this technology that you are working on to do that on a city wide level? 

Debra Laefer  30:50
Yeah. So obviously, acquiring the data takes a while processing the data. So it's not something that you just go out and do every day. But we do see that communities, municipalities, even states are doing this now on a pretty regular basis, if not once a year, once every two years, in fact, the United States, we are having the completion of our first national scam, which is pretty exceptional. The difficulty of processing and storing that data is in part related to the quantity of the data. If you want really good sub centimetre data, it's gonna be a lot. So that always has to be part of it. But we have certainly taken that data when we've, you know, generated middle little 3d models of parts of Dublin.

Dusty Rhodes  31:41
And where would an engineer be able to use that if he is looking as as a city planner? What kind of things would he be able to do with it?

Debra Laefer  31:48
So I think one of our very early visions when particularly we got our first data set back in 2008, we said status, so good, but it's not quite good enough. That the I think the aspiration was to have a data set that was so good, you could pick out the curb height. Wow. And I think that is what we really achieved in 2015, that the data was so good that we could determine bather, basically whether the edge of the sidewalk was handicapped accessible. So I think that's a very easy, accessible use case. We've now most recently moved, we just completed a project called Urban Ark, with UCD. And with work off under her up at Queen's University, Belfast, looking at urban flooding. And one of the key components to that was the detection of subsurface spaces, basements, parking garages, things like that. And although Lidar is a line of sight technology, we can get a pretty good understanding of some things, that there are the spaces and some extent the size of them. Based on if you're you know, the angle, you're collecting the data, you might see kind of the stairwell that many of our Georgian town-houses have, or even be able to capture some of the data through the windows, or the entrances to parking garages. And by incorporating that into a larger flooding model, we can determine more effectively where the risks really are, where's the water going? Are we over predicting, or these people are particularly at risk. And we've generated flood models that show that the subsurface spaces really have an impact of where the water's going, and how fast it's building up. So if you're trying to evacuate parts of the city, or deploy emergency services, you want to know where to do that you don't want to send people to the wrong places.

Dusty Rhodes  33:45
So listen, you've done Dublin City, I believe you're going for something slightly bigger for your next project.

Debra Laefer  33:51
We don't so much bigger, but maybe more technically advanced. So we've recently completed a one square kilometre area in south-west Brooklyn. And what's really special about that dataset is not only do you have this great LIDAR data, pretty much the equivalent but we didn't delve in a little bit denser. But we've coupled it with something called hyperspectral data, and hyperspectral data, ours is in the bottom of the shortwave range downward. So if you have materials that are known, and you can get the what they call the spectral signal from them, we can match that spectral signal with things in the built environment. So a computational model has two important components. One is the geometry. And that project through our lab work and those of others has largely been solved. But the assigning of those materials and those material properties has not and hyperspectral gives us that opportunity to start doing that.

Dusty Rhodes  35:02
So some exciting stuff happening, a lot going on. I love talking to you, because you're talking about things you did 20 years ago, that are almost like cutting edge. Now you have a type of brain that just thinks 2030 4050 years in advance. So I have to ask you, what do you consider now the main challenges that engineers today need to start thinking about?

Debra Laefer  35:25
I would say one of the main challenges is coupling these major weather systems or storm systems with that kind of urban level weather system, we have huge investments of, you know, trying to predict where hurricanes are going, and how much rain and how much storm surge. But what's really happening from the street level, say, up to the first 100 or two feet, there are not a lot of models. And yet all of that's controlling all these urban heat problems that we're having. And we just don't have those couple of models. So it's that multi-scale physics, that we're kind of missing right now, where people like me very much on the crowd at the bottom, could work with somebody like one of my collaborators, Olivia police here in our Chaos Group, which is our weather group in our maths department. Between Olivia and myself, there's a big space. And there's not too many people in that space. So I think that that's really where we need to start going.

Dusty Rhodes  36:32
I also wanted to ask you, because I was watching an interview with you, you were talking about the advice you give to your students, which I mean, it just rang true with me. It's when you're a student, make mistakes, because you learn more from mistakes. And when things go right. Now, that's great to say to students, we're all engineers listening to this podcast. Can you apply that to engineering in a real life professional situation? Or should you just have made audio mistakes in college?

Debra Laefer  37:02
One of the highlights of my educational career was getting to meet a geotechnical engineer named Ralph back. And Ralph peck at the time was the most important living geotechnical engineer in the world. And he had been a student of Karl Terzaghi, who is the founder of geotechnical engineering. And he would come at the age of, you know, 79. And he would give these talks about when he was a young engineer, working under Karl Terzaghi, and all the mistakes that he made. So it's good to make mistakes. And it's good to have senior engineers check them.

Dusty Rhodes  37:42
Keep trying new things, regardless. Yeah, kind of wrap up then by just ask, is there anything else that you'd like to add to our chat today that I haven't thought of? Or haven't brought up?

Debra Laefer  37:53
Yeah, I mean, I think that if people think they have a good idea, they shouldn't give up. That if you push on it hard enough, long enough, it will happen. As crazy as your idea may seem that a lot of times the best ideas are initially too far ahead of the curve. But don't give up on them.

Dusty Rhodes  38:15
If you'd like to find out more about Debra and some of the topics that we spoke about today, you'll find notes and link details in the description area of this podcast. But for now, Professor Debra Laefer from NYU Centre for Urban Science and Progress, thank you so much for an absolutely fascinating chat.

Debra Laefer  38:31
Lovely to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

Dusty Rhodes  38:35
And if you enjoyed our podcast today do share with a friend in the business just tell them to search for Engineers Ireland in their podcast player. The podcast is produced by dustpod.io for Engineers Ireland. For pre-released episodes, more information on engineering across Ireland or career development opportunities, there are libraries of information on our website at engineersireland.ie. But for now, until next time, from myself, Dusty Rhodes, thank you for listening.