Page 53 - FINAL Phillips 66 50 Year Book

The Cavern Pioneers Dinner was a celebration of the project and
recognition of the innovative nature of the work, and one of the last
chances to see inside the caverns. Once they were filled with LPG –
stored as a liquid within the caverns held by the hydrostatic pressure of
water in the surrounding chalk – no one would ever be able to go down
again.

The event mirrored when Brunel, the famous 19th century engineer,
held a celebratory dinner under the River Thames during the
construction of the Rotherhithe tunnel. One guest flew 4,000 miles to
dine on food cooked by Humber Royal Hotel chefs. The cold menu –
prepped in advance and lowered down to the caverns in lifts – included
Mediterranean salad, Vichyssoise Killingholme (potato and leek soup),
Escabeche (grilled turbot), kiwi fruit and a cheeseboard, washed down
by three vintage wines and port.

Waitresses wore mob caps to disguise their safety helmets and splashed
through ankle-deep water to serve the VIPs, and a time capsule was left
there, containing artefacts of the time and a record of the dinner.

Meanwhile, Conoco’s inventive prowess came to the fore once again
when the project faced a challenge: the tunnelling machines could
not cope with the unjointed chalk bed. It had unconfined compressive
strength of 30-60 MPa - much the same characteristics as concrete.
The bed also contained flints the size of footballs. Even working at
maximum efficiency, the machines were too weak and causing delays
to the project, so the decision was taken to blast the tunnels instead
- the first time anyone in the UK had attempted to blast through hard,
water-saturated chalk at that depth. Experts were called in and blasting