The Snowy by Siobhán McHugh

Author:Siobhán McHugh [Siobhán McHugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742244549
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing

CHAPTER 8

AN ENGINEERING WONDER

In 1962, the Snowy Mountains Scheme was nominated by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the engineering wonders of the world. It was a fitting tribute to the extraordinary advances that had been made since 1949. Before the Snowy Scheme started, America had been the undisputed world leader in civil engineering. Australia, on the other hand, had suffered from a serious shortage of engineers and an accompanying lack of ambitious projects on which they could develop their skills. When Ivor Pinkerton graduated before the war, he was one of only 11 civil engineers to qualify in Sydney that year. He had had three years’ routine work experience when the Snowy Scheme started, and was immediately attracted by its boldness:

I wanted to get into something big. Engineering in Australia those days just didn’t seem to take off – it was slow, jobs took a long time. The Snowy offered the prospect of an engineering project you could really be satisfied with – there was a sense of drive and purpose right from the beginning. And it had unique features: the tunnels of 6 or 7 metres diameter were amongst the largest for their length in the world at the time. Even the underground power station work – it wasn’t big by some standards, but it was new. It was a milestone in engineering at the time.

After working on some of the dams and serving as liaison officer for the junior engineers being trained by the United States Bureau of Reclamation, Ivor was appointed head of civil design for the Authority. He was still quite young and the position was probationary for the first six months. One month into the job, a crisis arose over the siting of the underground Tumut 1 Power Station: ‘There was trouble with the rock conditions. I was faced with the decision – to adjust the position, or to try and go ahead. It was an agonising choice, but in the end I moved it, and everything went well.’

At that stage, the Authority was still relying on the United States Bureau of Reclamation to design the major works. It had already designed Eucumbene and Tumut Pond dams and the Tumut 1 pressure tunnel, but by the mid-fifties, Ivor Pinkerton was convinced the Authority could take over:

The next job after I was put in charge was Tooma Dam. I remember going to a meeting with all the divisional heads and Sir William was saying he was going to give the job to the Bureau … I was incensed, and I said, ‘We’ll do it!’ Then they even said, ‘We know you can do it, but we want the job designed in six months’. I said we’d do that. I put the case so forcefully, Sir William said he’d wait and decide at the next meeting. I remember the chief civil engineer, who was in his sixties, turned to me and said, ‘I just hope you can do it, laddie!’ And we did. That was a turning point.

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