Alan Muir Wood

Sir Alan Marshall Muir Wood (born August 8, 1921 in Hampstead , London ; † February 1, 2009 ) was a British civil engineer for geotechnical engineering, who is best known as a tunnel builder.

Wood completed his engineering degree at Cambridge University (Peterhouse College) and then served as an engineer and officer in the Royal Navy from 1942 to 1946 . He then worked as a civil engineer for the British Railways until 1950, including repairing landslides in southern England (Folkestone Warren, Kent ) and building bridges. He then worked for the Docks and Inland Waterways Executive , for whom he set up a hydraulic engineering laboratory. In 1952 he went to the engineering firm Sir William Halcrow and Partners, in which he became a partner in 1964, became a senior partner in 1979 and retired in 1984, but remained active as a consultant and appraiser. From 1993 until his death he was visiting professor at Bristol University .

Wood dealt mainly with coastal protection and tunneling. In coastal protection, he worked on various projects in south-west England, including the protection of the Dungeness nuclear power station. In tunnel construction he was significantly involved in preliminary studies for the Channel Tunnel . He was already leading a team that carried out a feasibility study in 1960, which was followed by further studies over the next 20 years, in which he played a key role. At the end of the 1960s he was responsible for the planning of the freight tunnel, which was built relatively flat under a further used runway at Heathrow Airport in London with shield driving. Other tunneling projects were the Clyde Tunnel in Glasgow (built from 1957), the railway tunnel in Potters Bar , the Jubilee Extension Line of the London subway (opened in 1999) and the around 80 km long Orange-Fish River Tunnel in South Africa, the water supply serves. He was involved in a campaign against the rehabilitation of the historic Thames Tunnel by Isambard Kingdom Brunel (the first tunnel to be built with shield driving), which would have affected the historical substance too much.

From 1977 to 1978 he was President of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE), of which he was a Fellow. In 1973 he was one of the founders and first president (later honorary president for life) of the International Tunneling Association. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society , the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering .

In 1991 he received honorary doctorates from Bristol University (civil engineering) and Dundee University (law). In 1982 he was beaten to a Knight Bachelor degree . In 1981 he became a Fellow of Peterhouse College, Cambridge and Imperial College.

His son David Muir Wood is also a geotechnician and now a professor emeritus at Bristol University, author of the book Geotechnical Modeling (Spon 2004).

Fonts

• Coastal Hydraulics, London, Macmillan 1969, 2nd edition with CA Fleming, Wiley 1981
• Tunneling - management by design, Spon, London 2000

Web links

• Obituary at Bristol University