FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Chapter 4 Laying the Foundations

Having your own resource gives you the capability to respond to an emergency, which you can’t do if you hire everything you use.

used as evidence. Only when they’d done that could the stuff be loaded into skips and taken away. Practically everything and everyone we had was up in the City for most of that week, clearing up after the bomb. We were pleased, and even proud to do our bit to help out. The episode reinforced one of my fundamental beliefs: the value of owning your own plant, and your own fleet. Having your own resource gives you the capability to respond to an emergency, which you can’t do if you hire everything you use. This proved true then, and it has proved true on many occasions since. But not everything about the aftermath of the bomb was entirely grim. There was one amusing, almost surreal moment, when Patsy McEneany, one of the supervisors, was checking out the extent of the damage with Adrian Obie and Des Riley. They looked round the corner of the road and saw a large cordon of police officers guarding what looked like a large pile of litter scattered across the street. What had happened was that a cash machine at the Abbey National had been blown out of the wall, and thousands of pounds were blowing about in the breeze. Mesmerising. You don’t often see sights like that. What we didn’t realise immediately – because information about the explosion was only released gradually – was that one of our gangs could easily have been exactly on the spot when the bomb went off. The gang had been sent to do some patching work that very night, and one of the places they were planning to patch had a white van parked right over it. The gang phoned their supervisor who told them to get on with some other jobs and come back to it the next night. But they never did, because that white van was the van that had the bomb in it – and it exploded not much more than an hour after they’d been there.

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