Dozer Through The Ice, An Adventure in the Great White North.

In the 1970’s I worked for a construction equipment & supply company on the James Bay Power Project. Where is James Bay? Look at a map of Canada, look for a large body of water called Hudson Bay (Baie d’Hudson) that borders the North West Territories, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. James Bay (Baie James) is at the bottom.

What was the weather like, you ask? The ice came off the lake in July and was frozen again by the end of October in the town of Matagami, Quebec where my warehouse and house trailer were located. Matagami is 400 miles north of Montreal and was the base station and starting point for all works being done on the road construction north to the power dam construction projects on the selected rivers for the James Bay Power Project. Five rivers were selected to create power dams, the Nottaway River, the Rupert River, the Eastmain River, the Broadback River and the biggest of all the Le Grande River. The plan was to build hydro electric power dams on all these rivers which would eventually supply electricity for the whole eastern seaboard of Canada and the US.

I was there for the first 2 years of the project which was the construction of the 700 kilometers (430 mi) James Bay Road to the La Grande River which was begun in 1971 and completed by October 1974 at a cost of about $400 million.

The project was not met with open arms by everyone. There were the environmentalists and the Cree Indian Nation to contend with. It cost the Quebec Government & Hydro Quebec millions of dollars in compensation as the project took its path. Below is part of an article by two men who decided to drive up through this area.

I enjoyed reading this as it brought back many memories of when I worked on the project. The pictures in the towns of Val D’Or and Matagami showed hotels that I stayed at in 1970, before settling down in Matagami, still there today.

The whole story can be found at the following web site; http://www.purplelizard.com/james%20bay.htm

Hydro Quebec calls this "The Project of the Century" and they are most proud of their engineering feats, and rightfully so: in many ways this is an industrial wonder of the world. But at what cost? The "The Project of the Century" displaces the "People of the Millennia", and radically alters an environment and ecosystem that has been relatively unchanged since the last Ice Age. And for what? To drive the energy needs of the modern cultures living in southern Quebec and the northeastern United States. The valleys used by the Cree for over 4000 years have been traded for air conditioning in Boston and NYC. I'm not qualified to weigh the pros and cons of this very large and complex socioeconomic puzzle, but I do feel the need to simplify it to those very basic terms. I doubt the good people of NYC who turn on their air conditioners have the slightest idea they contributed to the destruction of an entire ecosystem to do so. And I fully admit to being part of the problem, as a Maine resident buying electricity from Canada, which remains a problem with no clear solution. In addition to satisfying our core curiosity about experiencing this remote region of Quebec, we were also thinking about some larger consequences of the industries which have become a very real part of this landscape. Hydropower is considered a 'green' energy, a renewable energy, but as with all engineering projects, there are trade-offs. It's increasingly harder to get at the truth.

From Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bay_Project

The project covers an area of the size of the State of New York and is one of the largest hydroelectric systems in the world. The project has cost upwards of $20 billion US to build and has an installed generating capacity of 16,000 megawatts, three times more than all of the power stations at Niagara Falls, eight times the power of Hoover Dam, and over twice the power of all eight reactors units at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, the largest in North America. If fully expanded to include all of the original planned dams, as well as the additional "James Bay II" projects, the system would generate a total of 27,000 MW, making it the largest hydroelectric system in the world.

While the impact of the James Bay Project was important, above all for the Crees of Chisasibi and Eastmain, there is still some debate within the environmentalist community over its overall environmental impact. While the La Grande complex has disrupted parts of a vast pristine ecosystem, it has also given the opportunity for thousands of gigawatt-hours of electricity to be generated pollution-free: unlike the reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam in China, the northern reservoirs of Quebec neither receive silt from the upstream tributaries, nor produce important quantities of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.

The price we pay to have A/C on the eastern seaboard.

The paved roads for the starting point of the project ended at a mining town called Matagami, Quebec. This was the jumping point for the project and all the construction companies had offices there. Matagami was a boom town for two years. But once the roads north opened up and the construction companies moved to their respective camp sites, it went back to the sleeping town it once was.

Back to my story…

The road construction crews worked a 6 day week for 11 months and only shut down for one month when the spring thaw can through. During this period it was not possible to move equipment through the area.

I saw many road incidents involving trucks, transporters, earthmovers, mobile homes and cars. Those of you who have seen Ice Road Truckers on the History Channel have an idea of what these Great White North roads offered.

One evening, a dump truck driving from a side road, with the dump bucket still in the air, onto the main highway which leads into Matagami, hit and broke the main power cable. The electrical charge onto the truck caused it to explode, and caused an immediate blackout in town for over 12 hours.

All the homes and businesses lost electrical power. I was without power in my warehouse and mobile home trailer, which were next to each other. As the temperature dropped in my trailer, I set up my sanctuary in one of the small bedrooms.  It consisting of a 5 Star 50 below zero sleeping bag for warmth on the bed and setting up 3 oil fired lanterns for heat. The oil lamps brought the temperature in the room to 60 degrees. When I went to bed the temperature inside the rest of the mobile home was minus 15 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.  Just as I was getting into the sleeping bag, around 11:00 PM, the power came back on. The furnace fired up and distributed the heat throughout the trailer. After a short while I was able to go back to my main bedroom and not use the smaller one. When I looked outside the windows I saw that most of the town was still without power. My trailer and warehouse power was connected to the Industrial Park line and not the town line which was why my power returned quicker.

Within 15 minutes many of my friends and coworkers made their way to my trailer as their homes and trailers still did not have power. By the time we all went to bed I had 17 extra people staying in the mobile home sleeping in the two spare bedrooms, pullout couches in the living area and whatever floor space was open. The wives and girlfriends all went back to their respected homes to get food and drinks for all of us.

Among these people to arrive was a man known as, Rick the Welder, driving his rig & truck. Because of the loss of power and no heat in the mobile home, my water line had frozen. Rick the Welder was able to defrost the line by using his welding rig to send a regulated electrical charge from the city water line into my water system and thaw out pipes. This had to be done carefully as to not burst the water line or send too high a power surge that would melt the solder at the copper pipe joint connections. Frozen pipes happened often in this environment and Rick the Welder knew what he was doing. Under the trailer he created a box where the main city waterline connection and the water pipes going into the mobile home met. In this box he installed a light fixture using a mechanics light & power cord. He explained that the heat from a 150 watt light bulb was enough to keep the pipe from freezing under the trailer. From that day on, my water pipes never froze again. Needless to say, he and his wife got one of the bedrooms.

When living in The Great White North you had to be ready for anything.  One New Year’s Eve I received a phone call at 5:20 AM from a contractor working on the road project. You can imagine what shape I was in when the phone rang. This contractor was not big on conversation and neither was I at that moment. He told me to get out all the longest lengths of reeled wire rope over 1” that I had in stock and that he would be at my warehouse in 15 minutes. I found 6 reels or wire rope that he could use and in exactly 15 minutes, three of the contractor’s trucks were at the warehouse door. As the contractor’s men loaded their trucks I asked the Boss Man what the wire rope was needed for. Remember the Ice Road Truckers I mentioned earlier?

He told me that during the night a truck which was hauling a new bulldozer up to his construction site had gone off the ice bridge and rolled over. Both the truck & ‘dozer had broken through the ice and they needed the wire rope to attach the ‘dozer to the trees on the shore side so that they could locate it at a later date.

The later date was Easter when they started to get the ‘dozer out of the water. I had left the construction supply company and had gone to work for this particular contractor as on site warehouse & purchasing manager. On the evening prior, I was told that they were going to attempt to raise the ‘dozer from the river. It took them 3 days to get it out.

They cut a hole in the ice and sent a diver down to see what the situation was. The diver found the ‘dozer but it was lodged in the silt at the bottom of the river. There were 4 lengths of wire rope still attached to the underwater ‘dozer. The diver secured the cables at the appropriate location on the ‘dozer. He then set up dynamite charges in the silt around the ‘dozer. The theory was, when the dynamite charge is set on off, it would create a vacuum which would dislodge the underwater ‘dozer from the silt and could be pulled out of the river.

The 4 cables that came out of the river were then attached to 4 larger ‘dozers on land and pulled tight. At the exact second that the dynamite charge was set off, the land ‘dozers hit full throttle and started to pull the underwater ‘dozer out. It worked!! The underwater ‘dozer was pulled from the river, placed on a flat bed trailer and on its way to the yard garage.

When I got to the garage that morning, there was the ‘dozer. The crew was in the process of removing all the ice, draining the fluids and changing the hydraulic and fuel filters. At 1:00 PM I could hear the mechanics turning the motor over so I went to take a look. The engine was being turned over to get the remaining fluids trapped inside.  At 4:00 PM I heard a commotion in the garage area and again went to see what was happening. They were about to start the motor.

Everyone was gathered around the ‘dozer he and watched as the Master Mechanic hit the starter switch. The engine cranked over, sputtered a few times and then started. At that exact moment where the motor started, there was a large explosion which shook ever point and person in the garage. Something had rocked out of the exhaust stack going straight through the roof the garage leaving a 6 foot hole in its path.

The one area that the mechanics had not cleared of ice and water was the muffler and 6” diameter by 5ft high exhaust pipe, which sat at the top of the motor. The muffler was still full of water and the exhaust pipe had a combination of water and ice still in it. When the motor fired up, there was a pressure build-up in the muffler and exhaust pipe, which created an ice rocket that, went through the roof. Once we all realized what happened, everyone roared with laughter.

The ‘dozer was moved into the back of the garage and parked. When it had gone through the ice, the contractor claimed the ‘dozer as a complete loss. Once it was taken out of the river it could not be used as a complete unit, so it became spare parts. I later went into the cab of the ‘dozer and looked at the engine run time hour meter. It indicated 21 hours, which meant the motor had 21 hours of run time. When the ‘dozer was loaded onto the flat bed truck at the dealership in Montreal the engine was started. The engine continued to run while on the transport truck as part of its break-in period. At the moment that it went into the river it had run for 21 hours on its trip up to James Bay.

It was never to run as a complete unit ever again.

*Names may have been changed to protect the innocent!