Turlough Hill - An extract from a story: In 1969, my brother, Jimmy, home from Belcamp College for Christmas, had heard from his football associates that the new power station, under construction at Turlough Hill was looking for office staff. He acquired an application form and handed it to me. In one of another cluster of Portakabins, sitting on a lakeshore, accessed by a newly-built roadway from the main Wicklow Gap road, I stood in a corridor and waited nervously for a previous interviewee to be released from interrogation. The door of an office opened and a smiling girl, whom I knew by sight, emerged. “Hello, come in!” a disembodied voice barked. Inside, a tall, blonde man, in open-collared shirt, fair-isle sweater and jeans rose from a chair and put out his hand. “Hi, I’m Tom O’Keeffe.” His associate, somewhat more formally attired in shapeless brown tweed jacket and slacks, shuffled awkwardly in behind the desk, yanked his office chair underneath him and sat down. “Howya, my name’s Tommy Taylor,” he said. The interview lasted five or six minutes. “We’ll let you know in a day or so,” Tommy Taylor said, and we shook hands. As the office door closed, I heard, “She’ll do.” I became the ‘Receptionist’, ensconced in a room, six feet by six feet. Two feet behind me, a floor-to-ceiling steel cabinet housed the whirring and clicking ‘switch-gear’ for the entire office telephone system. A small desk with a compact, push-button switchboard and a tubular steel chair sat in a corner, between a window and a sliding glass hatch on which visitors knocked to get my attention. Seven other offices, a kitchen and two staff toilets opened off the long corridor. The largest office was home to Accounts and shared by three people, with Tom O’Keeffe in charge. The other six offices were occupied by draughtsmen, engineers and two office managers, one Irish, one German. Two other females: Una in Accounts and Mrs Brügemann, the German secretary, completed the staff of ‘Tunnelling Consortium’: four German companies and one Irish company, sub-contractors to the Electricity Supply Board (ESB), that were charged with the excavation of four tunnels inside the former Tomaneena Mountain rising from the now half-empty Loughnahanagan Lake. One of these tunnels would reach the top of the mountain above, exiting in a second reservoir, now under construction. Within days, there was a palpable buzz of excitement. Mrs Brügemann tapped on my door and said, “Come on, outside. Quickly!” I followed the stream of staff from all three site offices onto higher ground and there, amidst the boulders and the heather, a string of trestle tables from the canteen had been laid out, draped in gingham tablecloths, and laden with glasses and bottles of champagne. Chief Engineer, Seán Wallace raised a megaphone to his lips and called, “Ladies and Gentleman, can we have a bit of quiet, please – and cover your ears!” Suddenly, the air was rent by a deafening bang and seconds later, an enormous pall of black smoke shot from the base of the mountain. Yellow and blue helmets were flung into the air as the crowd broke into cheering and applause. Champagne corks popped and brimming glasses were handed out. The first explosion, leaving a massive, gaping hole in the rock-face, marked the beginning of the tunnelling process, and had gone without a hitch. Directly across from my office, a handsome, chain-smoking German named Klaus shared an office with Engineer, Frank Aiken, son of Frank Aiken, former Minister for External Affairs. Frank and Heinz Wennrich, a diminutive site surveyor, became my allies and mentors, Heinz and his lovely Indian wife, Daphne invited me to dinner on a number of occasions and Heinz took it upon himself to teach me a German word every day. When Fr. Ray Maher, the Chaplain, asked me to write a regular feature about the Turlough Hill project for the Roundwood Parish Newsletter, Frank procured the smallest set of oilskins that he could find in the Stores, along with a helmet and goggles, and took me on a tour of the site. Beginning on top of the mountain, where gigantic machinery had removed thousands of tons of blanket bog, exposing a bowl of bare rock that would be the new reservoir, we took in the view across the Wicklow and Dublin mountain ranges, the plains of Kildare to the west, and the coastline to the east. Site offices were off to one side, in the shelter of a high embankment being built to surround the reservoir. My brother, Jimmy was now resident in one of them, as Wages Clerk for Boucher/Public Works. I took notes as Frank explained the concept of hydro-electricity and the significance of the first hydro-electric power station in Ireland. Below at base once again, Frank parked the Land Rover and we walked through grey mud and pools of water into the tunnel leading to the cavern that would house four giant turbines to generate electricity. A combination of drilling, rumbling machinery and air-compressors made conversation impossible. I could just look about me and take in the bedlam, watching dozens of miners on tall scaffolding, as well as on the ground, carry out their work, all of them covered in black grime; hardly recognisable. At lunchtime, Frank suggested we head straight to the canteen. Staff raised their eyebrows as they took my order at the food counter. At the table, in the company of my work colleagues, I thought I detected a few stifled giggles, but amid lively conversation, we finished lunch and returned to the office. In the ‘Ladies’, I washed my hands, took out a hairbrush, looked in the mirror and froze. Looking back at me was a black face with a goggle-shaped strip of white skin from the bridge of my nose to mid-forehead. Several soapy washes and rinses later, I walked, with anything but friendly intentions, into Frank’s office. He looked up from a set of drawings, and with a look that would melt a stone, asked, “Are you okay?” Klaus piped up, “You are ze baby in ze office, Eemelda, ve should be taking better care of you!” Thanks to my tour, I could now identify ‘Cat D8s’, ‘Cat D9s’ ‘Graders’ and ‘JCBs’, among other earth-moving equipment and a visit to Stores and the ‘Magazine’ had acquainted me with the names – and the smell – of cordite, detonators and other high explosives. I was now responsible for lengthy monthly site reports to Head Office in Munich, and thanks to Frank Aiken, I could now expound on the Turlough Hill project, under the title, ‘Life at the Top’ for the Roundwood Parish Newsletter. My newly-acquired ‘expertise’ also landed me a ‘nixer’, as Information Officer with the ESB, finding myself, on alternate weekends throughout the summer, in a converted mobile home, parked in a lay-by on the summit of the Wicklow Gap. Surrounded by maps and charts and diagrams depicting the proposed power station, I told the story and explained the technicalities of the project to any tourists that happened to stop by, adding that during construction, archaeological excavations had uncovered part of Saint Kevins Road, the ancient path through the Wicklow Gap by which pilgrims walked from Hollywood in West Wicklow to the monastery at Glendalough. From time to time, the late Jimmy Fitzpatrick came with his sheepdog from Valleymount, across the Gap and sat with me and chatted over a cup of tea. Jimmy and his dog were often more of a visitor attraction than the project, their images carried to the four corners of the globe on film. On my weekends off, the ‘Tourist Information Office’ was manned by the girl who had emerged from Tommy Taylor’s office on the day of my interview, some months earlier. A second celebratory champagne party took place when miners from Tunnelling Consortium, who had drilled and blasted their way to their cut-off point, shook hands through a tiny hole in the rising shaft with those from Boucher/Public Works, drilling down from the top. To onlookers, nothing could be seen; all the action took place inside the mountain. Nevertheless, another milestone had been reached: the shaft that would carry water from the corrie lake below to the new reservoir above was now open. During construction, Turlough Hill power station employed over five hundred personnel, a large proportion being miners from places as diverse as Austria and Donegal. The miners lived in a temporary camp on site, a veritable village, serviced by canteens, a shop and even a church. I was married and had two children when the first generator went on line in December 1973. Hidden in the depths of the mountain, the scheme became fully operational in 1974. The miner’s ‘village’ was dismantled, the stream of daily traffic ceased and Nature set to re-establishing itself around the lakeshore. It had taken ten years to complete and it was the largest civil engineering project ever carried out in Ireland. In my two-and-a-half years at Turlough Hill, I had been part of an historic enterprise. Forty-plus years later: esb.ie/main/education/Turlough-Hill-40-years.jsp
Posted on: Mon, 09 Jun 2014 17:13:37 +0000
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