Spall: A Factor of Safety Thriller

The fan had been bolted to the roof of the tunnel since 2011, and for fourteen >At ten to eight on a March morning it comes down onto a car in the nearside lane. The driving examiner in the passenger seat is killed. The seventeen-year- old at the wheel, eleven minutes into her first driving test, survives by the >Everybody says the concrete. The Haverscar Tunnel is forty-six years old, it sits in salt air off the North Sea, and every road tunnel in the country sheds concrete off its own face. It has a name - spalling - and a budget code, and >Ada Marram reads broken metal for a living. Hired by the contractor who needs this to be somebody else's fault, she finds that the concrete held. All four steel anchors failed, and they failed in fatigue - which takes years, and takes >The control system says that fan was started eleven thousand times. The fracture surface says four hundred thousand. And the bands across the metal are not a smear of ordinary wear. They are fifty-one separate visits, each one a night's work, going back further than the tunnel's own records survive - and somebody was standing at the control panel >She has no client, no warrant and no authority. She has a tunnel carrying thirty-one thousand vehicles a day, twenty-two more fans hanging over the >SPALL is the second Factor of Safety thriller. The engineering is real and checkable, and that is the point of the series.