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Atkins director Martyn Lass presented with MBE - 09 October 2012
The Princess Royal has presented Atkins director Martyn with an MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for services to the construction industry.
Martyn said: “When I started my career as an engineer, I never expected that I would one day be visiting Windsor Castle to receive an award from a member of the Royal Family.
“On a personal level it is an incredible honour to receive this recognition. However, working for a design and engineering consultancy is not about individuals. It’s about colleagues, clients and contractors working together to achieve complex and common goals. Therefore, for me, this award is also an acknowledgement of the skills and achievements of the incredible teams I’ve worked with over the last 40 years, in particular on the London 2012 Games project.”
Martyn project managed the enabling works for the London 2012 Games, playing a key role in helping transform the heavily polluted industrial site into a park which not only provided a platform for world-class sporting venues, but will be a lasting legacy fit for people to work, live and play for generations to come.
Mike McNicholas, Atkins’ 2012 project director, said: “Over the last four decades Martyn has led teams with distinction on many projects. He has helped raise the bar for what engineers can achieve, and there is no better illustration of this than the work he managed on the London 2012 Games. Martyn and the team left a legacy with this achievement, so it is fitting that he is now using his wealth of experience to help with the transformation of the Olympic Park.”
Martyn joined Atkins in 1970. He started work on the London 2012 Games project in early 2005 when he took on the role for Atkins as prequel and bid manager for infrastructure design. In December 2005, he was appointed project manager for the Olympic Park site wide enabling works. His previous experience in a similar role for the Greenwich Peninsula works for the millennium celebrations had already established his reputation as a skilled and experienced project manager. Other notable projects Martyn has worked on include Colchester Garrison, Bahrain University and Selby coalfield.
Over 200 years of industrial activity on the site had accumulated a range of diverse contaminants, penetrating both soil and groundwater. The site has been previously used as a refuse tip, a chemical works, a glue factory, a landfill site, bus depots, car repair yards, food manufacturing, a dye works, a residential site and industrial estates.
The scope of the enabling works across the 246ha brown field site included around 3,600 site investigations, demolition of 220 buildings, circa 2 million cubic metres of bulk earthworks, remediation works, river walls and utility diversions. The works provided cleared and remediated construction platforms for the follow on venue, infrastructure and landscape contractors works throughout the Olympic Park.
It is due to Martyn’s personal commitment, project management skills and understanding of how to get the best of the people around him that the following was achieved:
- Every milestone set by the ODA’s delivery partner was achieved on time and on budget. Atkins had to significantly accelerate the original project schedule for construction platform handovers: the delivery of the Stadium and Aquatics Centre platforms were achieved within 8 and 9 months respectively.
- Martyn introduced innovative techniques to manage the project, including the management of more than 500 sub-zones generating 600 handovers of land thereby allowing the follow on works to proceed at the earliest. The co-location with the client and contractors was also seen as a major benefit.
- With over 500 engineers and 10,000 workers on site at the construction peak, Martyn managed this hugely complex patchwork of works by building trust with the client and delivery partner.
- Over 97% of demolition materials were reclaimed or recycled and 80% of excavated materials reused following treatment and/or processing.
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About Atkins
Atkins (www.atkinsglobal.com) is one of the world's leading engineering and design consultancies*, employing some 17,700 people across the UK, North America, Middle East, Asia Pacific and Europe. It has the breadth and depth of expertise to plan, design and enable some of the world's most technically challenging and time critical infrastructure projects.
*It is the largest engineering consultancy in the UK (New Civil Engineer Consultants File 2012) and the 14th largest global design firm (Engineering News-Record 2012).
Recent projects include:
- Major infrastructure works, such as the design and programme management of the civil works for the Dubai Metro red and green lines in the UAE;
- Key rail projects – providing architectural and engineering design services on Crossrail, Europe’s biggest civil engineering project in London, UK, and designing stations, tunnelling and track systems for Gautrain, South Africa’s first high speed line;
- Renewable energy schemes – transformer platform design for the Thanet offshore wind park in the North Sea;
- High profile transport planning and urban design – our innovative scheme to deliver a diagonal crossing at Oxford Circus in London, UK, has helped tackle the problem of pedestrian crowding;
- Multidisciplinary building design – Northwood Primary School in Darlington, UK, is an exemplar project which raises standards for environmental design and community engagement;
- Multi-year architecture-engineering construction management services for the US National Park Service, including projects such as rehabilitation of the Furnace Creek Visitor Center and Administrative Complex at California’s Death Valley to meet the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold certification standards;
- Water and environmental projects – critical programme management of storm protection works in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and Southern Louisiana in North America, providing expertise in coastal restoration, engineering, environmental and GIS support to rebuild defenses and protect habitats.
Atkins was named among The Sunday Times 25 Best Big Companies to Work For 2011, received the first ever certification of the Carbon Trust Standard awarded to an engineering consultancy in the construction sector, and was included in The Times Top 100 Graduate Employers 2012, The Guardian UK300 Top Graduate Employers 2012 and The Times Top 50 Employers for Women 2011. Atkins was named Education Consultant of the Year at the 2012 British Council for School Environments Awards, and was awarded a RoSPA Gold Award 2011 for excellence in control of health and safety in the workplace.
Atkins is the official engineering design services provider for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
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Martyn Lass MBE
Atkins' London 2012 enabling works project manager