A wonderfully emotive piece from Megan Samuel providing a snapshot of her life as an acoustic consultant. From playing with toy diggers and building blocks as a child to now managing construction monitoring equipment and leading on data analysis and reporting for Clients.
Thank you to everyone who has supported Megan on the job including Ted the site dog. Give him an extra large bone from us!
……………’🎀 I was never the girl who played with dolls or Barbies.
Give me building blocks, toy diggers and anything that involved making a mess. 🚜🦺
Which is why it’s slightly ironic that when I first started working on the East Anglia Three (EA3) onshore cable construction project nearly two years ago… I found it completely intimidating. Looking back, I think it was just the teething stage.
My job seemed simple on paper: visit site once a month, measure the construction noise, analyse the data, compare to the NVMP and write the report.
In reality? The survey work often felt like a wild goose chase. 30+ work sites spread across 40km of rural Suffolk meant driving around like a headless chicken trying to find the active one. Add weather delays, full PPE in summer, repeatedly explaining “Yes, I promise I’m meant to be here”, and discovering that track mats and hire car tyres are not the best combination. 😭😂
But those teething problems didn’t last. Before long, these became some of my favourite survey days.
I’d turn up to measure noise and leave having learnt about HDD, jointing bays, fibre optics, cable installation, archaeology, plant (the list is endless), and somehow asking, “What tonnage is your excavator?” became completely normal. 🫡
The best part, though, was the people. From coffees with the traffic management team, excavator operators showing me what ‘skills’ the machines could do, project managers taking the time to explain everything, farmers kindly letting me borrow their loo, and of course, Ted the site dog 🐶. Everyone was incredibly generous with their time and knowledge, and I learnt far more than I ever expected.
Some (and I stress some 😂) days, construction monitoring looked less like what I imagined and more like standing on a country footpath in the sunshine, surrounded by hares, deer and birds of prey, thinking… this is actually my job.
What started as one of the most intimidating projects I’ve worked on ended up becoming one of my favourites. It’s been one of the first projects I’ve had the chance to follow from start to finish, and I’ve learnt more than I ever expected along the way. On top of that its all for renewable energy.
Turns out little me with her toy diggers was onto something after all. 🚜💚……….’
