Crossrail’s Experience of Geotechnical Baseline Reports – A Client’s Perspective

Crossrail’s Experience of Geotechnical Baseline Reports – A Client’s Perspective

Speakers - John Davis of GCG and Mike Black of Transport for London

Joint Meeting of the British Geotechnical Association (BGA) and British Tunnelling Society (BTS) at the Institution of Civil Engineers, One Great George Street, Westminster, London SW1P 3AA

This is a free event and advance booking is not required. Tea and biscuits will be available from 5:30pm.

An event flyer can be downloaded here.

The presentation sets out to record Crossrail’s experience of GBRs from the client’s perspective.

It covers why Crossrail adopted GBRs, where they were adopted and summarises how they were adopted.

A semi quantitative assessment of the performance of the GBRs is then presented along with an analysis of the types of encounter that gave rise to successful compensation events.

The presentation closes with a subjective view on whether the GBRs were a success and some thoughts on who is best placed to write them.

Speaker Biographies
John Davis EurGeol BSc (Hons) MSc CGeol CSci FGS

John is an engineering geologist who has been working in geotechnics since the mid 1980s, mostly as a consultant and designer but with periods working for contractors as well. About a third of that time has been spent working on tunnelling projects.

In the mid 90s John was seconded in to London Underground for a

couple of years to run a research project into the impact of rising groundwater on LU infrastructure.

For most of the last 10 years John has worked almost exclusively on Crossrail where he was seconded into the Chief Engineer’s Group. During this time he was closely involved in the production of all the Crossrail GBRs.

When Crossrail construction started he had an overview role for any ‘in-ground’ issues that arose east of Farringdon, this often included assisting individual project teams in assessing GBR related compensation events. John is a Partner at Geotechnical Consulting Group where he has worked for the last 10 years

Mike Black BSc (Hons) MSc CGeol CSci FGS

Mike is a Principal Geotechnical Engineer with 30 years’ experience primarily spent in the tunnelling industry on projects that include the Channel Tunnel, Jubilee Line Extension and Crossrail.He is currently with Transport for London working on a number of TfL projects including Crossrail 2.

During his 20+ years on Crossrail, where he held the role of Head of Geotechnics, he was involved in all stages of its development, from early feasibility design, the passage of the Hybrid Bill though Parliament, detailed design and ultimately construction. Mike held technical authority for all geotechnical matters on Crossrail and his responsibilities included the design and procurement of Crossrail’s ground investigations, defining the geotechnical requirements and standards during design as well as geotechnical oversight and support during construction.