User talk:Donna Bowden

Don't remove references, please. Island Monkey talk the talk 15:17, 18 May 2011 (UTC) The information on the page is incorrect and I need to update it. How do I go about changing it? There are also broken links within the References section. Please advise.

I understand that you have to upload the information as I cannot overwrite material. The correct text is below, and if you need to call me to verify my number is number removed:

History of the Costain Company spans nearly 150 years and, during that period, has benefited the lives of millions of people around the globe.

The Company has built airports, petrochemical plants, waste treatment works and schools – creating the building blocks of modern life and improving the quality of life of the people who use them.

That same Company has gained a reputation for unusual levels of entrepreneurialism and innovation in solving engineering problems around the globe. It has become the Company to which clients turn when a complex project looms; frequently, it has been the Company to which those clients have turned when others have tried and failed.

It has consistently punched above its weight, survived a ‘near-death’ experience in the 1990s and today is again involved in creating infrastructure that will serve the nation for decades to come.

By the mid-19th century, the Manx Costains had been farming around Colby, in the south of the island, for 500 years. Richard Costain would probably never have left if it had not been for an unlikely combination of potato blight and love.

The collapse of the potato crop persuaded him to switch from farming and become an apprentice joiner; but when he attained the necessary professional standard his parents would not allow him to marry his intended wife, Margaret Kneen, until he had established himself financially.

In 1865, therefore, Richard and his future brother-in-law made the short crossing to the booming port of Liverpool where they successfully began to trade as jobbing builders and undertakers.

The Company’s first venture outside Merseyside was the construction of workforce accommodation for a steel company at Redcar, northeast England, during the First World War. But it was a move south to build houses in the booming suburbia around 1920s London that really sparked the family firm’s expansion.

It became known both for the construction of large ‘gentleman’s residences’ in leafy Surrey and estates of more modest dwellings such as that built to house Ford’s workforce at Dagenham, Essex. (Indeed, the plots for the Surrey homes were so substantial that even today Costain, which still benefits from the legal covenants governing the use of the land, periodically receives payments from owners seeking permission to build new properties in their extensive gardens.)

That housing expertise found its greatest expression in the construction of Dolphin Square in London’s Pimlico. The largest block of flats in Europe at that time, the first 600 apartments were ready for use just a year after construction started in 1935.

The second phase contained innovations not only in the swimming pool, squash courts and restaurant contained within the building but in its novel centralised heating system, involving waste heat being piped from Battersea Power Station on the opposite bank of the Thames.

The 1930s saw the Company move overseas for the first time. A contract to build an 11-mile section of the Trans-Iranian Railway through the Alborz Mountains was discovered – remarkably, only after the deal had been signed – to require long stretches of tunnels and viaducts, rather than conventional railway construction. The contract made a substantial loss, but the Company’s technical prowess in driving through such difficult terrain greatly enhanced its reputation.

Iran was also the site of Costain’s first foray into petrochemicals, with the building of the refinery at Abadan in 1938.

During the Second World War it helped create the remarkable Mulberry floating concrete port that was towed in sections across the English Channel to give the Allies a logistics foothold in France in the days following the D-Day invasion.

And when peace returned, thousands of semi-permanent Costain-constructed concrete houses designed to last for a maximum of 30 years continued to give service for a decade beyond their estimated lifespan.

Expansion in the Middle East continued, with the creation of a 10 million gallon-per-day water distillation plant helping transform Kuwait from a small fishing port into a modern city. (Links with Kuwait continue to this day, with the influential Kharafi construction family holding a major stake in the Company.)

Airports in Bahrain and Dubai followed, as did the world’s largest dry dock and the Middle East’s largest deep-water port in Dubai.

Post-war, grey, austerity Britain was enlivened by the creation by Costain of the Festival of Britain site on the south bank of the Thames. The Company’s commitment to quality again became apparent when, at the festival’s end, a suspension bridge spanning the Thames designed and built by the firm was loaded to destruction as an experiment. It reached five times the maximum permitted load before showing signs of failure – bringing the rather ungracious comment from a watching Government minister that it had obviously been over-designed in the first place.

Coalmining also made an appearance in the Company’s portfolio, with the Westfield opencast mine in Scotland becoming the largest man-made excavation in Europe.

Opencast interests expanded into Australia, but it was a venture into geologically troublesome deep mines in the US that was a major factor in almost bringing down the Company in the mid-1990s, when several years of severe losses came close to extinguishing the Company’s light.

Even during this difficult period, however, epoch-making projects continued. With the aid of 56,000 tonnes of explosives Chek Lap Kok Island was levelled to provide Hong Kong with a new international airport, while the nearby 1,377-metre Tsing Ma suspension bridge, built as part of a consortium, became the world’s longest combined road and rail bridge.

Africa, too, was for many years fertile territory for Costain, with Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Botswana among the countries where swathes of infrastructure and major buildings were erected.

The Company created many of Sydney’s major office blocks, while offices and hotels regularly emerged from the clay foundations of London. More exotically, Tomsk, in Siberia, was the site for the creation of an oil additives plant.

At ‘home’, iconic projects included the Thames Barrier, which has been raised more than 80 times since the 1980s to prevent London being flooded and Costain played a key part in the construction of the Channel Tunnel and the Channel Tunnel Rail Link including the recent revitalisation of St Pancras Station to accept Eurostar trains.

Today, vital infrastructure work in the Capital continues, to expand the flow both of water supplies and rail passengers through construction of the London Ring Main and projects such as Thameslink.

Awards for quality, innovation and safety are regularly won. In 2010 the Company was named by one of the UK’s most influential construction publications, New Civil Engineer, as Contractor of the Decade. Costain has now embarked on a major new strategy – ‘Choosing Costain’ – which aims to make Costain one of the UK’s top solutions providers offering a full service from front-end engineering consultancy and design, through construction to back-end care and maintenance.

Donna Bowden (talk) 15:43, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I had to remove that phone number there. Call the oversights! Island Monkey talk the talk 15:44, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Oh, and do you have any refs for your revision? Island Monkey talk the talk 15:47, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

There will be a Costain website page this week with this exact wording - so presumably you need that before you can upload the new text? Donna Bowden (talk) 15:51, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
 * You just need to edit it. And also, don't copy the whole or some of the text of the website, that is a copyright violation (I know, I hate copyright as well). Just make it a reference (you know, put the website inside some tags). Island Monkey talk the talk 15:57, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

To confirm then.... as long as I dont delete the entire Costain History text (and ensure that the 'refs' are kept in the body) I am fine to edit the text throughout the page? Sorry for the questions, this is all new to me! Donna Bowden (talk) 16:06, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes. Island Monkey talk the talk 16:16, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Please ensure your edits to the Coatain article are properly linked to other articles (line by line), referenced (line by line and fact by fact), devoid of any material that appears on a company website (in which base it would fail the test of being independently sourced) and contains no promotional material which overtly praises the subject. Thank you. Dormskirk (talk) 10:30, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

I dont understand why the link wont work and now the Costain page has erros, will you please help me? Donna Bowden (talk) 10:38, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Sure. Please see some suggestions below. Dormskirk (talk) 10:56, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Welcome
Welcome!

Hello, Donna Bowden, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful: I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on discussion pages using four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Again, welcome! It would be really good if you could read these guidelines before making any more edits. When you feel more confident then you should try making one or two small edits i.e. a single sentence. In the meantime if you are an employee of Costain you should not edit that article anyway or you will be in breach of WP:COI. Thank you. Dormskirk (talk) 10:54, 21 May 2011 (UTC) I just deleted the 'advertising' text and it has now not saved. why wont my amendments save? Donna Bowden (talk) 11:02, 21 May 2011 (UTC) I have now reverted the text to its original version, please remove the warning message. I will look into this further to establish why we are unable to use Company verified text on this website. Donna Bowden (talk) 11:10, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * Tutorial
 * How to edit a page and How to develop articles
 * How to create your first article (using the Article Wizard if you wish)
 * Manual of Style
 * OK. I will remove the warning (although it should really stay in case other company employees seek to amend the text). The reason why you cannot use "Company verified text" is already well covered in WP:SOURCE which requires all material to be independent. Dormskirk (talk) 11:17, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Please would you remove the warning banners on the Costain Group page, as i have reverted to the orig text now?
 * Done. Dormskirk (talk) 11:24, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

Donna Bowden (talk) 11:18, 21 May 2011 (UTC) Thank you Dormkirk, I work in the Communications department and was tasked with this amendment, so nobody else will try to do the same. Donna Bowden (talk) 11:20, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
 * OK. No problem. Please feel free to edit other articles on wikipedia - just read the guidelines first. Many thanks. Dormskirk (talk) 11:24, 21 May 2011 (UTC)