Peter Gordon Hines
Notability (1) Book about his worldwide successful career ISBN 978-1-71-456394-4 (2) 1980s Sumatra job liaising civil-engineer speakers of Bahasa, Japanese, Korean, and (his) English, a strong example of English as the world's lingua franca for civil engineers (3) Despite the lingua franca, his multiple languages (4) 50 years member and activity in the Institution of Civil Engineers.Duncanogi (talk) 19:16, 25 April 2021 (UTC)
Peter Hines (October 28, 1944 - January 10, 2021) was a British civil engineer, who worked on large projects from 1968 to 1997 in Scotland, Malta, Nigeria, Romania, Australia, Sweden, Norway, the North Sea, Scotland again, England, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Sumatra, and Hong Kong again.[1]
Hines was successful in a career[2] partly because the English language from the 1950s became the worldwide lingua franca for civil engineering. Additionally, and unusually for the British, he spoke as a child two languages, English and Swahili, because he was brought up in Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital of Tanganyika (later to be Tanzania) his two languages seemingly helped him learn other languages. While working in Romania and aided by French and Latin at school in East Africa and England, he learned to fluently speak Romanian,[3] a Romance language linked to Latin. Later with six years in Sumatra, he spoke Indonesian Bahasa confidently.[4] He also spoke useful Cantonese and Thai. These local languages aided local work negotiations he maintained.
Nigeria 1969/71. Hines was responsible for building Nigeria’s first earth-satellite telecoms ground station and 100 miles of microwave-link towers to Lagos to link Nigeria to Europe. Shortly after completion, the local inhabitants sabotaged it because they would have no further paid work in the area.[5]
After the Biafran war, he had Biafra-housing-aid work.
Romania 1972/3. Age 28, he was responsible for 60 workers developing irrigation canals with River Danube water for a vast, fertile area near Dăbuleni in southern Romania. The Romanian government paid the British government with tomatoes and fruit.[6]
Australia 1973/4. North of Perth, he repaired the 265-mile-long Mount Newman Railway line with its miles-long iron-ore trains, extreme heat, and sheep as big as donkeys.[7]
Lloyd’s Register of Shipping 1975. Sweden, Norway, North Sea oil platforms, Scotland’s Loch Kishorn for the world’s then-heaviest man-made, movable object, the 600,000 tonne Ninian platform.
London 1976/7. The Thames Barrier, built to minimise the risk of flooding London: a 35-metre-deep cofferdam under the River Thames with a 5-metre-thick underwater concrete Tremie plug.
Hong Kong 1977/84. While responsible for prestressed-concrete building the first of the two Ap Lei Chau bridges across Aberdeen harbour in Hong Kong, Hines identified the design mistake that the two 60 metre cantilevers would not meet in the middle of the bridge. A design engineer was needed from Australia for six weeks to design an "emergency raise" to solve the problem, saving much time and money. In 1979, he was responsible for the building and opening of Happy Valley’s curving, 40-span viaduct roads. He warned that the design of the sloping roads would flood rain into Hong Kong’s racecourse and Harbour tunnel – floods there were, needing expensively-dug flood tanks hidden under the racecourse.
Bangkok 1985/7. The world’s then second-longest, 450-metre-span, 40-metre-ship-clearance, “cable-stay” King Rama IX Bridge. Hines was responsible for building its dual-double-T, post-tensioned concrete approach viaducts with thirteen 50-metre double spans on each bank, cast in-situ with a steel travelling shutter, up to 40 metres above the ground.
Sumatra 1987/93. Japanese funds reduced the monsoon flooding by 45kms of the River Aceh in northern Sumatra. As the only native-English-speaker, his main job was to co-ordinate[8] the work, meetings, and documentation of the Japanese, Korean, and local contractors, the Japanese aid-staff, and the Indonesian authorities (locally and in distant Djakarta, Indonesia’s capital city). With meetings in Djakarta, he got agreement to order from England 50kms(!!) of 8-metre plastic “mattresses”, grout-filled on site, to strengthen the sandy banks of the river – sufficiently strong to survive the upstream sea-water flooding by the 2004 tsunami that killed some 167,000 local Banda Aceh citizens.
Hong Kong 1993/7. Kowloon Lung Cheung Road and other roads.
Private life[edit]
Peter Gordon Hines was born with his twin Deborah Frances Hines of their mother Bertha Hines on 28 October 1944 in Arusha, Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Their accountant father David Gordon Hines was a Captain in the King’s African Rifles fighting the Italians who had invaded Abyssinia. After the war ended, the family moved to Dar es Salaam, the then capital of Tanganyika. The twins first went to school in Dar, and then each term with their older sister Penny took an overnight train to Dodoma for a 12-hour bus ride through Iringa to Sao Hill School in the Southern Highlands of Tanganyika. Peter then went to Blundell’s School in Tiverton, Devon, England. He trained as a civil engineer in Oxford University and then Imperial College in London.
Peter Hines at school captained rugby and cricket teams. He was a keen skier in the Alps and Scandinavia; a golfer around the world; sailed and owned a third of a Ruffian sailing boat in Hong Kong; twice crewed in the 565-mile South China Yacht Races; skippered annually, later in life, 10 or so times bareboat sailing with friends in the Cyclades and elsewhere; enjoyed the company of girlfriends in Romania and Bangkok; and enjoyed beer, particularly in Wan Chai in Hong Kong and the White Hart pub by the Thames in Barnes in the west of London.
In retirement, he mostly lived in Barnes. Just before Christmas 2020, his doctors, for a health condition, sent him to nearby Kingston Hospital, in which he caught Covid-19 and died on 10 January 2021.
References[edit]
- ↑ "Peter Hines, civil engineer who worked on large-scale projects around the world – obituary". The Daily Telegraph. January 25, 2021. Retrieved February 19, 2021.
- ↑ Beanz means Hines / Peter Hines — the worldwide civil engineer ISBN 978-1-71-456394-4 Search this book on
.
- ↑ Beanz means Hines / Peter Hines — the worldwide civil engineer ISBN 978-1-71-456394-4 Search this book on . page 2
- ↑ Beanz means Hines / Peter Hines — the worldwide civil engineer ISBN 978-1-71-456394-4 Search this book on . pages 2 and 21
- ↑ Beanz means Hines / Peter Hines — the worldwide civil engineer ISBN 978-1-71-456394-4 Search this book on . page 8
- ↑ Beanz means Hines / Peter Hines — the worldwide civil engineer ISBN 978-1-71-456394-4 Search this book on . pages 17 and 18.
- ↑ Beanz means Hines / Peter Hines — the worldwide civil engineer ISBN 978-1-71-456394-4 Search this book on . page 11
- ↑ Beanz means Hines / Peter Hines — the worldwide civil engineer ISBN 978-1-71-456394-4 Search this book on . page 19
This article "Peter Gordon Hines" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Peter Gordon Hines. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
