Taj Mahal
Volume 1: Chapter 10
Channel Tunnel Study Group - 50th Anniversary

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Lessons Learned?


Eurotunnel terminal in France. Courtesy of Shutterstock.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the signature of the Submarine Tunnel Study Group "Protocol of Agreement." This document led to the commissioning by the Study Group of the detailed design of a railway tunnel under the English Channel; the design, supervised by the late Charles Dunn, that was executed cooperatively by Bechtel Corporation, Brown & Root, and Morrison-Knudsen Company, Inc.; printed in 1959, it was approved by Monsieur René Malcor and Sir Harold Harding, chief engineers of the Study Group, and served as the basis for the Eurotunnel constructed 1986-1993 which opened to traffic in May, 1994.

It was in Paris, on July 26, 1957, that the agreement was signed by leaders of the U.K's Channel Tunnel Company, Ltd; the Société Concessionnaire du Chemin de Fer Sous-Maris Entre La France et l'Angleterre, the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, the International Road Federation (Paris Office), and Technical Studies, Inc. of New York. The Board of the Study Group included Louis Armand, the modernizing chairman of the French National Railways (SNCF); Jacques Georges-Picot, head of the Suez Canal Company; and others, eventually including Thomas S. Lamont, Fellow of Harvard College and Vice Chairman of Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York and George Wildman Ball, a future U.S. Undersecretary of State. It has been suggested that, by combining leading experts on the project in the same committee as officials authorized to influence and carry out the decisions regarding it, the Study Group embodied the concept of "the decision seminar," as developed by Professor Harold D. Lasswell of the University of Chicago (later at the Yale Law School).

Technical Studies, Inc. donated more than 100 bound, paginated and indexed volumes of the Study Group's history to the Baker Library at the Harvard Business School. This material is open to the world's scholars. For a concise, single-volume book on the subjects, we can cite Chunnel - the Amazing Story of the Undersea Crossing of the English Channel, Times Books, Random House, 1997, by Drew Fetherston, a former staff writer of The Wall Street Journal. The "Chunnel" has been an impetus to the improvement of rail systems throughout Europe. What lessons can be learned upon reflection of 50 years?

If the Channel Tunnel had been built when the 1959 design was printed, the cost could have been $100 million, not the $15 billion actually incurred by the 1986-1993 construction of, essentially, the identical design. The failure to ratify, in 1975, the Treaty already signed by the U.K. and France, led to unproductive further studies and hesitations, allowing inflation - and the rise in construction costs at an even greater rate than general inflation - to escalate costs beyond what "prudent" politicians were able to anticipate. For the future, it will be wise to streamline the processes of permissions and authorizations.

As co-authors of a book spanning 3000 years of human history shaped by macro engineering (Building The World, Greenwood, 2006), we find the Channel Tunnel (Chapter 39) might be a harbinger of future trends. Many problems the world needs to solve led the International Association of Macro Engineering Societies (IAMES) to list critical initiatives - ten of them - that will involve multi-country cooperation can be found at www.buildingtheworld.com. Contiguous nations will increasingly share regional resources such as transportation, water and food supply, energy, disaster response, healthcare and even interconnected sportsways (with parallel paths for hiking, bicycling, horseback riding and, in some cases, skating and boating). ITAIPU, creating the water supply for Brazil and Paraguay, is but one example of shared future. In 1957 and afterwards, the Channel Tunnel Study Group matured agreement through the old-fashioned convention of shared lunches. How can current advances in the technology of communications help craft and charter agreements that work as well today?

The field of macro engineering was developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Macro-Engineering Research Group in a period of more than a quarter-century, commencing in 1970, and now subsumed under systems engineering, with frequent use of the system dynamics methods pioneered by Professor Jay W. Forrester. Deeply influenced by his years with the Channel Tunnel Study Group, the "Chunnel" formed Davidson's orientation as Director of the MIT macro-engineering program. Long before the 1985 official approval of the Channel Tunnel scheme, Davidson was appointed to offer a course on "The Failure of Human Systems" where he met Kathleen Lusk Brooke when she joined the MIT seminar. A Harvard-trained medievalist who founded the Center for the Study of Success, Dr. Lusk Brooke joined Frank Davidson when Harvard's Radcliffe Institute invited them to present courses - "Failure" in the morning and "Success" in the afternoon, with the two classes having lunch together, to see both sides of the issues presented by guest lecturers including the late Archibald Cox who came to discuss the Watergate episode.

In forthcoming years, the United States and the European Union will be challenged to provide a more prominent role for the use of large-scale technology in diplomacy. Philosophically, the field of macro-engineering is based on William James' 1910 plea for a "Moral Equivalent of War."

Frank P. Davidson
Kathleen Lusk Brooke
http://www.buildingtheworld.com

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