FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 7 Building for the Future

That was a proud moment, I can tell you. I wished Dad could have been there to see that.

to Parliament Square, had to be converted into a temporary ‘Games Zone’. All the conversion work (temporary kerbs, road restraints, pedestrian refuges, etc.) had to be completed in two six-hour periods over the course of two nights. We had over a hundred people out there for that job. I went out there with other members of the Board (Andrew, Mike Betchley, and Joanne) just to witness the sight of all those Conway people working on the most important street in the country, up and down the road as far as the eye could see. We laid a thousand square metres of asphalt on just one of those nights. That was a proud moment, I can tell you. I wished Dad could have been there to see that. And almost as soon as we had got all the special measures up, we had to take them down again. Removing the Olympic Routes was all done in two two-week periods. That wouldn’t have been possible without our Chelsfield depot. Steve Hart had up to twenty artics a day coming into Chelsfield to unload during those four weeks. The Olympic and Paralympic Route Networks were our highest profile involvement in the London Games, and they drew in Conway staff from every Division; but they weren’t our largest Olympic contract. At around the same time that the frozen water pipes were bursting in Oxford Street (January 2012), Brian Morris and his team were on a training course with MI5 down in East Grinstead. They were learning about Hostile Vehicle Mitigation (HVM), which are the measures you put up to prevent hostile vehicles (e.g. cars with bombs) from gaining access to sensitive sites such as the Olympic Venues. The contract that Brian had won from the London Organising Committee

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