FM Conway - Going the Extra Mile

Going the Extra Mile

So, when he reconnected the cables, there was a massive flash – he fell off his ladder, and the building across the road exploded.

That was not funny. But I did hear a funny story at the time, although I don’t know if it is true or not. Apparently, about a week after the bomb went off, a man gave himself up to the police, saying he was responsible for the explosion. He had been living with the terrible guilt for a week, and he couldn’t bear any more. The police locked him in a cell, had the station surrounded by armed guards, and asked the man what had happened. His story was this. He was an electrician, and he had been working in a building across the road. He was repairing the cable work over a lift, and in order to save time, he hadn’t bothered to isolate the electricity supply. So, when he reconnected the cables, there was a massive flash – he fell off his ladder, and the building across the road exploded. He had run home, and locked himself in his room, where he had been shut away for a week, too frightened even to turn on the news. But now he had decided to confess. F ortunately, bombs don’t figure largely in our area of work. But John Nuttall reminded me recently of another bomb episode he had been involved in, which had ended much more happily.

• POLICE LINE DO NO He was supervising a number of jobs in the Croydon area, including one at Archbishop Lanfranc School. The school had been built on an old tip, and they had recently discovered that methane was filtering through the tip and getting trapped under the concrete slabs of the buildings. The solution that the engineers had come up with was to dig trenches around all the buildings, put perforated pipes in, line them with polythene, and fill the trenches with a large-grade stone. The idea was to trap the methane in the trenches, let it filter into the pipes, and then vent the pipes out away from the buildings. Well, when John went in one morning to see how the gang were

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