David takes on Goliath

There are now 21 , 16,  13 days until David (me) takes on Goliath (my former employer mouchel, their solicitor, their barrister etc.) at an Employment Tribunal in Bedford on March 26th, which would have been my 24th wedding anniversary. This is for unfair dismissal for whistle-blowing (dressed up as a redundancy). It is open to the public, so come along and watch/listen. I am having to represent myself as I couldn't pay for a good solicitor and legal aid let me down.

The issues over which I whistle-blew (15 times) are serious concerns over the management incompetence and physical maintenance of our 1200 plus bridges here in Milton Keynes. I now strongly suspect a cover up from start to finish. However, since there has recently been published an audit on my concerns which took 16 months to complete, and which completely vindicated and validated what I had been pointing out all along, the matter is now in the public eye although naturally mouchel and their client Milton Keynes Council who have the legal duty for the care & maintenance of the majority of MK's bridges, are trying to keep the whole thing quiet.

Thats why I started the blog site www.thebridgesofmiltonkeynes.blogspot.com and also on Facebook to keep things very much in the public eye. Pressure of time preparing and fighting my tribunal case as well as still seeking work and income combined with the learning curve of the blogspot software have so far slowed that effort down. Not many people have signed up to follow it and the content has been minimal but I hope to accelerate that over the next week.

We know what happened to Goliath, don't we?  I will be out for slingshot practice most evenings now!

An Ode To Six Bridges - (Beware the Odes of March!)

Two years ago this very day, after a 3 week stress related illness brought on by my concerns about bridges and my earlier initial whistle-blowing being ignored, I returned to work on the Monday morning only to be confronted by a blinking message light on my phone even before I saw down. It turned out to the first report of 8 aluminium bridge parapet thefts, carried out by by our metal moving community who are with us from time to time.

I have some photos which I'll add as soon as I can find them, or if not, I'll go and take some more.  Tinkers Bridge Canal Footbridge MKC no.87369 is a footbridge over the canal which had an expensive refurbishment in early 2009 which included jacking the deck up to fit new bearings, re-painting the steel beams (already rusting in places), re-surfacing, replacing some of the aluminium parapets previously stolen some 4 or 5 years previously and fitting (badly, as it happens) some aluminium extensions to the parapet to make it higher for the protection of cyclists on the bridge.  I have never heard of a cyclist crashing off a bridge because the parapets were too low, have you?  No doubt some further piece of Brussels imposed legislation thrust upon us.  MKC spent £130,000 some years ago fitting these extensions to 10 bridges, that's £13,000 for each bridge. One of these was stolen within months of fitting.

The cheeky metal moving thieves came to this bridge 4 times to progressively steal more. Working with the police to try and prevent further thefts all over the place, they installed a camera near the site,  sadly not a closed-circuit camera which would have been effective, but a static one. Well they even stole the camera as well as the rest of the 1 year old parapet extension.  I was later criticised by my "management" for the time I spent trying to secure these other bridges and working with the police to prevent further thefts and consequent detriment to the public safety and purse.

In my despair, I wrote this poem.

An Ode To Six Bridges  -  (Beware the Odes of March!)

Tinker’s Bridge is where it started,
The Bridge Engineers are so down-hearted.
A lady rang, she said “It’s gone!”
“Tell me Madam, what is wrong?”

“They came at night, and no-one saw,
They think they are beyond the law.
The fixing bolts have gone,
Hand-rand-rails sold for a pretty song.”

The Bridge Inspector checks in vain,

The parapet thieves have struck again.
Thames Valley Police have been told,
But the information leaves them cold.

The aluminium price has gone insane.

This just won’t do, that much is plain!
It puts the public in many dangers,
Watch out for light-fingered strangers!

So far, they’ve been to six,
And it takes so very much to fix.
Fishermead and Simpson make it three,
Hodge-Lea and two on the A5D!

Railings too, by the old Grand Union,

With a scrap-yard make communion.
However can we make it stop?
We really need  a Super-Cop.

An Eastern gang or home grown criminal?

The difference is really quite subliminal.
So think hard on what all this means,
It’ll cost us dear in Milton Keynes!

Another verse for my friends only:
Three weeks off with too much stress,
 He has come back to such a mess!
 Now this nonsense has been started
 Methinks Bridge Inspector’s too down-hearted!

Special posting to see if Lesley is following

This is a new safety fence (from the bottom RH corner) connecting to a an existing bridge paprapet on the H5 Portway obver the West Coast railway line.  You can see that there isn't a plate connection between the 2 elements and that the contractor who fitted the new safety fence has left it propped up with 3 bits of timber!!!

We are moving house so to speak



Thats me on the right telling the reporter Phiip Lack from
3 Counties Radio what's wrong with this bridge

Well actually I'm already fed-up with Facebook too as I still can't compose the content that I want to. So what I'm going to do is this: I'm going to start a website on WordPress. I need a website anyway to create a permanent index to different bridges and their content, I can use the blog facility in WordPress to create the frequently updated blog. For all you as yet unnumbered Facebook users and however many it is that are just looking or  following on Blogspot, I should be able to add a hyperlink to the website for you all to see the latest actual content that bypasses the restriction on photos and so on that I find in both Blogspot and Facebook. I just need to learn how to use WordPress now and set it up. Another rapid learning curve!

Thank goodness that I have at least found out that I can use my voice recognition software to dictate the text to this. It's called Dragon NaturallySpeaking and it will type text probably 30 times faster than I can type it and 20 times more accurately. Good stuff! I'm getting to like all this technology. Who says an old dog can't learn new tricks?  I still can't get the damn photos to upload though! It looks like I just have.



This is a glaring example of what's wrong with some bridges safety fence connections!
In this case the plate has been bent cold (without heat) & fitted by the contractors (only about 4 years ago) with a huge crack running through it.  The bigger bolts on the left are too short to engage the threads in the nut to enough depth to be useful.  The smaller bolts on the right are all completely loose or finger tight.  This was how it has been left by the contractor who must have had a "Safety Fence Erection Licence" to do the the job as part of the £25M upgrade of Junction 14 a few years ago.  I have reported this 4 times since early 2009 to get it fixed under warranty.  As of last week it was still the same.

Newport Pagnell's famous and historic iron bridge

This is just an initial photo.    I am still struggling to learn how to get the content I want into here.  I do not seem to be able to just paste documents I have composed in Word or Powerpoint where I can precisely control the arrangement of text and pictures that I want to show you.  This is both frustrating me and slowing me down. 

The urgency is to show you the general and travelling public, the defects in so many of our bridges which in some cases endanger you.  In all cases these defects threaten your wallets now and in the future.  Through incompetence and neglect over many years,  a tidal wave of bridge maintainence will soon break over Milton Keynes and district.  As someone who has inspected over 500 of them in my recent job as MKs only Bridge Inspector, I can speak with a certain amount of confidence on this matter.

No-one except the housebound, hospital patients or those in jail can go anywhere in their daily lives without the use of MK's 1200 plus bridges.

This iron bridge is now revealing significant signs of rust as Gary Baxter's excellent photos will show, as I can post them.  

You heard it here first! Well done Mark Lancaster MP

From: BRAMALL, Alice [mailto:BRAMALLA@parliament.uk]
Sent: 16 February 2012 15:00
To: georgeharlock@georgeharlock.plus.com
Subject: Re: Bridges

Dear Mr Harlock,

Thank you for your email regarding the bridges in Milton Keynes we received yesterday.

Following your email Mark has been in contact with the council highlighting your concerns.

We have been informed that all of the 62 highest risk bridges have now had principal inspections.

With regards to your concerns about the schedule of minor repairs, it appears that it didn’t get through to their repairs team but this has been rectified and will virtually all be completed by the end of February.

Mark is keen to ensure that you continue to get the support you need and is grateful for you raising this.

Kind regards,

Alice Bramall
Parliamentary Researcher to Mark Lancaster TD MP
House of Commons | London SW1A 0AA
0207 2198344

Why I'm doing this - a reminder!

We take bridges for granted, there are more per square mile here than anywhere in the world. Some are quite interesting, some have history, a few are pretty and some are frankly boring but we need them all in good order. Did you ever see the film The Bridges of Madison County? See where I got the idea from: http://www.grannybuttons.com/granny_buttons/2008/09/the-bridges-of.html This a blog about life on the canals by a canal boat owner who also helps edit Waterways World magazine. See his blog about the day we met.

This blog attempts to raise public interest into a clamour to have our local bridges properly maintained. Having been the bridge inspector for 3 years until my redundancy last April, I can say that it is an outrage how they have been looked after, (or not). I may tell you a tale or two! Bridge management has been anything but Lean for too long. I want to get some of these fixed. Maybe go and see for yourself. Join in lobbying.

Next bridge up - The Fabulous historic Iron Bridge at Newport Pagnell.  I just need to work out how to get Gary Baxter's amazing photographs of the structure into this blog along with the text I want.  It almost looks to me as if he has been able to climb into the underside ironwork which is more than I was ever able to do when I gave its last 2-3 yearly General Inspection. But then he is a professional photographer!

Before I feature it, how many of you following or reading this know when it was built?  Answers on a post card please...

The Bridges of Milton Keynes blog No.1

Now I finally know how to do it!  This is called learning on the job, by trial and plenty of error!
This is British Waterways bridge no. 83 on the Grand Union Canal.  I'm tired, cold and hungry now.  I'll tell you something about it tomorrow and show you a couple of things wrong with it.  I promised you bridges by Sunday, well here's one anyway and it's 20 to Sunday.

I rather like this bridge over the Grand Union canal near my house. A farm accommodation bridge, it was known locally by the "natives" of these parts as Jones' bridge, Jones presumably being the farmer. Its shape is typical of the humpback you see on canals and is a simple brick arch.  Strangely enough, this canal bridge numbering system begins in Birmingham and gets bigger as it travels to London.

Owned and maintained by British Waterways, it hasn’t got a build date on it which many have.  Vandals have damaged and/or stolen many of the rounded coping stones on the parapets with many signs of repairs and replacement brickwork over the years. 

The missing bricks from the pillaster (a sort of pillar at the ends shown above) does not bode well for the continued longevity of this bridge.  I have previously reported this to BW.

Ice reveals a great deal, not just icicles

Thanks for signing up for bridges blog Alex.  Getting to grips slowly with how the wretched Blogspot s/w works and discovering more about diff. between Internet Explorer and Google Chrome web browsers and how that affects Followers & the user interface.  You SHOULD be getting notifications of recent postings - please let me know if you do or don't. I PROMISE bridges pics on there by Sunday.  Have more serious photo evidence to gather tomorrow, the severe frost has revealed some interesting things that I suspect no-one but me knows (or cares) about.

Learning curve with this Blogger software

I'm sorry folks for the delays in getting real bridge content onto this thing.  I am experiencing great frustration in getting content in the format of the pictures and text I want where I want as well creating the "masthead" I want.   Also there's something I don't understand about the way Followers works on this blogsite. For some reason at least one person I know has signed on as a follower and yet doesn't show up on the list.  I need encouragement to succeed with this,  it is for the good of everyone in Milton Keynes who moves anywhere over or under our 1200 plus bridges that I blew the whistle.  I lost my job 10 months ago because I did so and am continuing to raise the roof over it all, hence this blog.  I shall give some public talks on The Bridges of Milton Keynes sometime soon.  PICTURES definitely one way or the other by this time tomorrow.  Anyone out there who is good at blogging who can help?

Brrrrr! Blooming snow! 1 day old news.

Overnight, a new bridge inspector has arrived from Up North to help us out here in Milton Keynes, I found him (or her – it’s hard to tell with bridge inspectors these days) wandering about looking lost when I took Sandy for a walk in the snow (which I thoroughly enjoyed).  I’ll have to point him (or her) in the right direction.  As you can see, he’s (or she’s) very bright, and certainly wearing all of the PPE – Personal Protection Equipment required these days, but if you look closely, you’ll find the silly sausage has got the hi-viz jacket on the wrong way round!  Also the laces on the steel-toe capped safety shoes are undone.  Not very clever is it?  Still I’m sure that he (or she) knows enough about bridges to get by.  The old one did apparently but he made too much noise.

 Unlike the old bridge inspector, this one shuns publicity which is probably just as well he (or she) says.  After all, we don’t want anyone to know what’s going on do we?  The name’s Pinocchio apparently!  Can you see why boys and girls?

If he (or she) sticks around long enough, maybe they’ll tell you all something about our interesting bridges here on this blog.  Do you think I should let him (or her) loose on the blog?  The new Bridge Inspector says that it would help us get better maintained bridges if you would all please become a follower of the blog by clicking the Follower tab – top left.  Also that he (or she) would like to get 1000 followers in MK by the end of February so please tell all your friends too.  He (I think it’s really a bloke) thinks that the council and the people who are supposed to look after the bridges will then have to start following the blog themselves because they won’t know which bridge is to be featured next with photos of some of the defects.  Then they’ll have to do something about them.

Pinocchio likes the look of Milton Keynes already which is great because the weather suggests that he could be here a long time.

Pinocchio, the new Bridge Inspector arrives in MK

And I thought they didn't need another Bridge Inspector??

Pinocchio, the new Bridge Inspector arrives in MK

Look who else turned up amidst today's snowy landscape, the new Bridge Inspector for MK, sent from Up North. Unlike the old one, he doesn't like the glare of publicity (or the light) hence the sunglasses but he is keen on having on the correct safety gear on. He's been busy since he got here and is holding up his first bridge General Inspection report. It's not looking too good he says. Well at least he's found a friend already and thinks he'll like Milton Keynes. I wonder what the old inspector guy's doing?

Published today but drafted nearly a week ago

Well what an amazing week I've had for getting publicity about the state of our bridges here in Milton Keynes!  Since last Friday  I have participated in a BBC Look East piece which was featured 4 times during the day.  Interviews with BBC 3 Counties Radio morning shows called getting Milton Keynes Talking on Monday morning, Tuesday and again yesterday.

I have talked to the audit committee expressing my views on the whole sorry saga of managing most, but not all, of Milton Keynes many bridges.  Oh, and of course a couple of telephone interviews for our local papers.

I'm having to learn on the hoof how to blog, I've never done it before.  I hope it will be of interest locally.
By the end of the week I am really quite tired but glad it's all out in the open at last.

What really happened to the Bridge Inspector I wonder? Subject of a Murder Mystery Party perhaps?

Whilst some of the intended bridges on this blog site do have some serious issues, some of which will be shown, many are OK, some are rather lovely and interesting, some are frankly quite boring but useful all the same. The photo above, I found in the archives taken by a previous bridge inspector (not me, two before me) shows that some of us bridge enthusiasts don't take ourselves that seriously!

Next post - Bridge No. 1 of The Bridges of Milton Keynes series of blogs.

Pictures will be be done by local professional photographer Gary Baxter (in addition to my existing ones).  Editing will be by local copy writer Debbie Temple.

Are you aware that we have over 1200 bridges here in the Milton Keynes area that we are completely dependent upon to get around the place?  This is even greater than the 409 in Venice, a place famous for its bridges.  Sadly though, they seem to be completely taken for granted.  As a result, I have penned a few thoughts about some of them that I hope you'll find interesting. I’m including photos to raise awareness amongst local people regarding just how important these structures are.  

No-one knows the exact number for sure as they are owned by different bodies who don't necessarily know the precise number either.  In my former employment as the Milton Keynes bridge inspector I came to know, appreciate, and actually to care about, some of the 500 or so that I personally inspected as well as some of the others I have seen.

More to follow over the next few days, including the first bridge profile.