Learning from Success

SCENARIO 3 CASE STUDY: THE LONDON SUMMER OLYMPICS PROJECT

The most successful Olympics construction transformation ever?

At the 117th International Olympic Committee Session held on 6 July 2005 in Singapore, London was finally successful in its bid to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. This was the culmination of three devastatingly unsuccessful prior attempts to host the Olympics, with Birmingham in 1992, and Manchester for 1996 and 2000. It was also London's third time hosting the summer Olympics, the first city to do so ever. With an estimated 4 million additional visitors by 2015 as a result of the Games, the creation of 14,000 new tourism jobs, over 70,000 volunteers and over 10,000 athletes, London was determined not to disappoint. The budget to develop the infrastructure for the games was an estimated 9 billion pounds and the project involved major regeneration of Stratford, building of an Olympic Village and the Olympic Park and updates and improvements to local facilities and infrastructure. One example of this rejuvenation took place in the form of the Village, Europe's largest new housing project. The Olympic Delivery Authority (ODA) was set up and tasked with overseeing the construction of new venues and infrastructure for the Summer Olympics and Paralympics, and to oversee the continued use of the facilities post Olympics. As part of the Authorities' aspirations, construction work was to include six key themes which included safety and security (the others were equality and diversity, employment and skills, design and accessibility, sustainability and legacy). This construction task was mammoth and health and safety was at the forefront of everyone's minds. It was a highly successful event, and thus hailed as one of the most successful Olympics ever from a safety and security perspective. The safety performance during construction given the size and complexity of the project was staggeringly good - as at June 2011, the accident frequency rate over 62 million man-hours was 0.17 per 100,000 hours. The transformation involved a workforce which peaked at 12 000 and a total of 30 000 people working on the construction project over its lifetime alone, and required demolishing in excess of 200 buildings and moving over 1.8 Mt of soil. By scale alone, the number of workers involved far exceeded the number involved in the construction of Heathrow Terminal 5.

Source: Shiplee, Waterman, Furniss, Seal and Jones, Delivering London 2012: health and safety , Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Civil Engineering, 2011, 164, No. CE5.

So, what went right with the London Olympics? We use our web diagrams and provide further detail below.

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