Fishing lured UK specialist to work on bridge

Brian Wilson learned to dive so he could supervise the sinking of piers for the harbour bridge. Photo / Dean Purcell

Building a mega-bridge on the other side of the world was all the excuse a young English engineer needed to go fishing.

"I read about the magnificent trout in the log-pool at Lake Okataina so, when I heard my employer was about to start on this bridge, I said I've got to go - I talked them into it," recalls Brian Wilson, now 81 and still running a civil engineering practice from his North Shore home.

Despite being in charge of sinking the largest of the bridge's six piers, for which he had to pass a Navy diving course to inspect the harbour bed 30m below sea level, he also found time to meet and woo his New Zealand wife, Geraldine.

Mr Wilson was 27 and a specialist in submarine engineering when he arrived in 1955 to supervise the difficult and potentially dangerous task of sinking piers using watertight pressurised chambers called caissons, from which workers excavated the harbour floor.

His diving forays came after a "big wake-up call" in which the floor subsided from under the caisson for another pier, causing the chamber to lurch dangerously by 25 degrees with crew and a fellow engineer inside.

They emerged shaken but unhurt and Mr Wilson is proud that rigidly enforced spells of up to four hours in decompression chambers above each caisson averted any serious cases of the "bends" caused by nitrogen in the blood.

That was what killed three workers and paralysed an engineer in charge of building New York's Brooklyn Bridge in the 1870s.

The Auckland construction project also claimed the lives of three workers, but they were casualties of falls, one on to the concrete floor of a caisson and the others from beams above the harbour.