Parting words from outgoing ATS President – Harry Asche

By Harry Asche

I would like to describe to you some of the highlights of my time as ATS President, now that my second term is complete, and Richard has taken over. Being the President of the ATS is rather like receiving the loan of a powerful motorbike. It is exhilarating, and your job is mainly to direct the force in a beneficial manner. (But from time to time, you have to do some maintenance and repair.) The power that I am referring to, is the people of the ATS. The ATS is populated by members who are enthusiastic and want to help. It is really an amazing organisation. Out of all of my leadership positions, this one was the best, because of you, the members.

Harry Asche formally hands the ATS Presidency over to Richard Buckingham at the ATC2023 in Auckland

There are several people I need to thank for the help they gave me and the ATS, and if I don’t mention you all, this is because of space limitations. I mention the names of the committee chairs below, but I know that these people were leading so many other hard-working and wonderful people.

Ed Taylor was the previous President and he had steered the ATS through some difficult times, leaving me with the ability to build on the strong base he left. Geoff Archer is now entering his 9th year as Treasurer giving us continuity and good advice. I relied on Geoff’s advice many times. The ATS has also been made stronger by the constant work of Andrew Ridout, he continues to provide us with excellent ideas and gets things done. The technical sessions have moved from strength to strength with Anthony Harding’s guidance and coordination.

One of the achievements that we had in my term was to increase the number of chapters from five to seven. The new chapters of Diversity in Tunnelling (DiT), and Tunnel Systems, Operation and Maintenance Group (ATS SOM) were set up by enthusiastic members and the chairs of these groups, Nadine and Cristian have reported on the many people who brought these groups into being. The chapters are where the real business of ATS happens, and they were led in my time by Richard Buckingham, Nigel Casey, Phil Clark, Diane Mather, Morteza Ghamghosar, Jiang Aziezi (Aziz), Jurij Karlovsek, Brodie Aitchison, Nadine Makin and Cristian Biotto.

A particular achievement that I was proud to be involved with, was the publication of the ATS Tunnel Design Guideline. It was truly awesome to watch the Young Members (YMs), under the leadership of Simon Brinkmann, create this document. While the YMs wrote the document, many senior people gave great feedback and suggestions. The Design Guideline was the recipient of the 2022 EA President’s prize, well deserved.

The ATS Tunnel Design Guideline

ATS has a tricky relationship with EA. Legally, ATS is an unincorporated society of EA. EA insure us, and the EA board hold the legal liability if something the ATS has done goes wrong. However, this is not how we feel. While we use EA facilities and are provided with EA secretarial services, we like to behave independently. ATS is an industry body. We represent owners, contractors, consultants, academics, suppliers and the workforce. Many of our members do not hold engineering qualifications, and they are often not EA members. There is a natural tension in the relationship.

EA also has a high staff turnover. In my four years there were two different EA presidents, three CEOs and three different people assigned to be our secretary. Each of these new people tended to view ATS as a servant to EA, until we met with them and patiently explained our position. The fact that ATS is consistently one of the Technical Societies in EA who have excellent feedback, helps us in these negotiations. We have had one person at EA who was always there and who has always been our friend: thank-you Sheryl Harrington.

We had two excellent conferences, the 2020+1 conference in Melbourne and the recent 2023 conference in Auckland. An ATS conference is like a mini Olympics and there was so much work done by the committees led by Rob Muley for Melbourne and Bill Newns in Auckland. These two, with their committee members, were magnificent.

In 2022, we celebrated the ATS’s 50th anniversary. The year went extremely well thanks to the organising committee and its excellent chair, Charles MacDonald. As part of the committee’s production, we produced the Special Edition ATS50 Celebratory Journal, which was very well produced. Before the 50th year, we had employed the talented Lauren Bordin to act as website manager/journalist, but she has been followed by the even more talented Penny Jones. Penny did a magnificent job on the Special Edition Journal and continues to help our indefatigable journal editor David Lees to produce our journals. Penny has made the ATS website come alive and has transformed our LinkedIn page, almost doubling our reach.

The ATS50 Celebratory Publication

When I look over the paragraphs above, I see that I have mentioned a lot of people. This is odd for a person like me, who chose engineering to avoid people and to indulge my love for applied mathematics. But life tends to give you what you need, rather than what you want. The fantastic people who are our industry are what makes it such a privilege to work in. To you, who are members of the ATS, you are great people to know and to work with, and I thank you all.