The Week of the Hatton Garden Robbery

The week of the Hatton Garden robbery, I was ten minutes up the road with no power.

April 2015. I came off the tube to police, fire engines and smoke coming out of a manhole in the middle of High Holborn. An electrical fault in the Victorian tunnels under Kingsway had ruptured a gas main. Around two thousand people evacuated, Holborn station shut, power gone across the area.

Our job stopped. Then it was Easter.

Starting the evening after that fire, and running through the whole four day weekend, a gang drilled through a vault wall in Hatton Garden about ten minutes from that manhole. Half of London decided the fire had been the distraction. The police and the fire brigade both said it was not. It was a coincidence.

I was running four floors of Cat A in that building. Strip out, power, lighting, fire alarms, sprinklers, and chilled beams with the lighting, sprinklers and alarms integrated into them.

The building was 110 High Holborn: floors 5 to 8, stripped out to shell and core, June 2014 to June 2015.

The fire cost us about a day and we absorbed it.

The chilled beams were the harder thing, and they were nobody's bad luck.

They would not fit in the lift. They would not go up the stairs either. We knew that and we planned for it. Craned to the roof at fourth floor, then moved by hand with lifting gear to the upper floors, with glazing out of the curtain walling to get them into the space.

Knowing about it does not make it quick. A chilled beam carries the lighting, the sprinklers and the alarms in one unit, so it is delicate, and one knock sends it back to the supplier and takes your date with it. You cannot rush a thing you are not allowed to damage.

That is the part that never gets a proper duration on a programme. Not the install. The getting it there.

For anyone with long lead items on a live job at the moment. Is there a real duration against getting them into the building, or does the programme start at "install"?

Giving the getting-there a duration

On a live job a long lead item has two programmes: the supply, and the route into the building. The second one is usually missing. For each long lead item, ask:

1. 1.

   How does it get from the delivery vehicle to its floor: lift, stairs, crane, by hand?

2. 2.

   What lifting gear and how many people does that take, and is it booked?

3. 3.

   What protects it on the way, and who is allowed to touch it?

4. 4.

   What happens to the date if it is damaged and goes back to the supplier?

Put the answers on the programme as tasks, ahead of "install".

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