POSTING #77

The Big Bang at Britt

As we drove to Philadelphia last month (you can scroll down to Posting 76), I was impressed with the amount of highway construction taking place---construction that is funded, I suppose, by the US Government's stimulus package.

It was not just resurfacing---although there was a great deal of that---but the building of new and wider roads.

And it was obviously expensive construction, especially in Pennsylvania with huge rock cuts blasted out of the Appalachian mountains.

The rock cuts reminded me of the summer of 1952 when, having just finished Grade 10, I worked for the Drury Construction Company, a firm based in my hometown of Arthur. The company had a contract to build a few miles of the new Trans-Canada Highway, north of Parry Sound, near Britt.

Parliament had passed legislation in 1948 to create a federal-provincial highway system to link the 9 provinces (10 when Newfoundland and Labrador joined Canada the next year).

The Drury contract involved improving parts of the existing Highway 69 by blasting rock cuts through the hills, using the freed-up rock to fill in valleys, thus leaving a wider road surface (although still just two lanes) with gentler hills and more generous shoulders.

And blasting the hard Canadian Shield rock was expensive. We were told that the cost was going to be a million dollars a mile---an unbelievable amount to my 16 year-old ears.

My job when I arrived at the construction site in late June was to feed sticks of dynamite into diamond-drilled holes.

I should warn you that there is going to be a fair bit of description about drilling and blasting techniques before we get to the story.

I think it is interesting stuff---but that's me.

Please feel free to skim the next page or so.

I'll tell you when the story starts.

On my first day on the job, I had a 10 minute lecture about dynamite from Davey (not his real name), who was in charge of the blasting operation---his informal title, in accordance with construction tradition, was, 'The Powder Monkey'.

Davey, who was short with a slightly hunched back, was a fussy person---but 'fussy' I always think is good when you're dealing with dynamite.

On the job, he wore a pith helmet that looked as though it had come from a Malaysian rubber plantation. (No one, at that time, worn hard hats---just something to keep the sun off.)

Davey started his talk by showing me the wooden case that dynamite was shipped in. It was made without any nails--- just dovetailed joints and glue---to prevent sparks. (I have since seen those boxes in antique stores, selling for upwards of a hundred dollars---we used to burn them to make our lunch-time tea.)

But, he explained, I shouldn't be afraid of dynamite, it was not really that dangerous. You could saw a stick or burn it and it wouldn't explode. It needed an explosion to set it off.

Old dynamite that was 'sweating' was another thing. It was unstable and unpredictable but we didn't have to worry---all our dynamite came fresh from the CIL plant, up the road in Nobel.

He took a stick of dynamite (an oiled cardboard tube about 8 inches long and an inch in diameter, filled with something that looked like compressed, damp sawdust), punctured the bottom with a sharp wooden stake and inserted a small blasting cap with two long, slender wires attached to it. He removed a wooden plug from one of the drilled holes and, holding onto the wires, he gently lowered the stick down the hole. When the stick hit bottom, he anchored the wires at the top.

My job, he said, was to drop sticks of dynamite into the hole, making sure not to let the wires fall in, until the last stick was a foot or so below the surface. An electric charge would detonate the cap in the bottom stick, which in turn would detonate all the sticks above it. Then I was to fill the top of the hole with sand and replace the wooden plug, to keep the rain out.

Standing up, he described the area that was going to be blown up in the next big blast---about 100 yards long, 30 yards wide and 10 yards deep.

He said that he and the drilling foreman, an East European we'll call Joe, had walked over the area and agreed on the placement and depth of the holes. Joe and his men were in the process of finishing the drilling There were wooden plugs, a yard or so apart in every direction, showing the holes that had been drilled. Meanwhile the drillers were at the far end of the area, completing their work.

Davey said that if he and Joe had got it right, the blast would fracture the rock into chunks small enough to be handled by a power shovel and dump trucks and the whole thing would go straight up and then come straight down into the newly-created trench with a nice crest along the middle of the trench.

If they got it wrong, well, rock would fly all over and there would be huge boulders too big for the power shovel to handle, rocks that would have to be re-drilled and blasted, causing delay and extra cost.

I spent the next several weeks feeding dynamite into the holes. I was wearing heavy, rubberized gloves that were designed to prevent the nitroglycerin in the sticks from being absorbed through the skin and causing what was known as 'powder headaches'. (Nitroglycerin's ability to lower blood pressure causes headaches but can also---as in angina, with nitro capsules under the tongue---ease pain.)

The gloves didn't work.

I suppose that's an exaggeration. Perhaps the end-of-day headaches back at the bunk house would have been worse without the gloves.

At the time, I couldn't have imagined anything worse than the pounding that was going on in my head.

Looking back, and to be fair to the gloves, I am sure I wiped sweat off my face with the gloved hands thus transferring nitroglycerin onto my skin.

An old-timer in the bunk house, a fellow in his late 60s told me that even though I had a headache I was lucky to be working with dynamite, rather than black powder.

When he was a teenager, he had worked on the building of a rail line in Northern Ontario. According to him, the technique was to make a hole in the rock with a huge drill bit and a sledge hammer. Men would hold the drill bit and turn it after each hammer blow. When the hole was several feet deep they would fill it with black powder, light a fuse and run.

The rock would fly off in every direction. Then the men would go back to what was now a deeper hole, and repeat the drilling and blasting until the desired rock had been removed.

He said that much of the drilling and blasting was done by workers imported by the railway company from China. The work was hard and dangerous and a number of the Chinese workers were left alongside the rail line in shallow graves.

This is another aspect of the shameful treatment accorded to early Chinese immigrants ---a part of our history that recent governments have, quite rightly, been recognizing and trying to put right.

As I continued filling the holes I wondered about the signs on the highway near our project warning drivers to turn off radio transmitters. I wasn't then---and am not sure now---how great the risk is of a radio transmission setting off a blast.

I remember thinking that it wouldn't be nice to be blown up because a taxi driver decided he should tell his wife he would be late for dinner.

A much greater risk was lightning.

We left the project whenever a thunderstorm threatened.

Smoking was also seen as a risk and it was banned from the blast site. Every hour or so, Davey and Joe would put a pinch of Copenhagen snuff between their cheek and gum, and after they had absorbed all the nicotine, spit it out.

Not a pleasant habit, and cancer-causing according to medical authorities. Google tells me that young people refer to taking snuff in this way as 'dipping'.

See how reading this blog keeps you current!

When the holes had been filled (and my head had stopped pounding), Davey went around connecting the blasting cap wires together into circuits and then checking with a voltage meter to make sure everything was 'live'.

For those of you who have been skimming, this is where the story starts.

The big day arrived. All the circuits had been tested and re-tested and the master wires connected to a portable generator (the blast was too large for one of those plunger things one sees in cartoons).

Flag persons had been positioned on Highway 69 to block traffic. A horn would sound for a minute, Davey would throw the switch on the generator, and the blast would blow.

A tense Davey was prowling around checking and re-checking. He noticed that there was a couple, with a car and a tent, in a camp site, alongside a small river, about three hundred yards from the blast area. He asked me to go over and tell them to go down the road about half a mile until after the blast.

I went over and said there would soon be a warning horn and then a huge blast. No one could predict where the rock would go and I told them that for their own safety they had to leave. Then I waited as they got in the car---leaving the tent---and drove down the road.

I came back and crouched with some others behind the huge and heavy steel bucket of our power shovel, a few hundred yards from the blast.

Traffic had been stopped, and Davey started his countdown.

Suddenly he stopped the countdown and shouted, "Hunter, where are you?"

I stood up.

He said, "I thought I told you to clear that couple out of the camp site."

"I did."

"Look over there."

There was the couple, sitting around their campfire.

I ran over and asked them what they thought they were doing.

The fellow said that they had decided that since the car was safe, they could return to the campsite. He assured me that they would go inside the tent when the warning horn sounded.

I was flabbergasted.

I can't recall exactly what I said but I remember there was a bit about a hundred pound rock coming through the canvas.

They reluctantly took off down the road. I waited until they were a good distance away before returning to my place behind the power shovel bucket.

The countdown started again, then the horn and finally the BLAST.

We scrambled up a hill and looked down at a perfect trench, with a mound of rock littered with pieces of wire and dynamite casings. The rock had gone straight up and come straight down---just as Davey and Joe had planned.

I looked over at the tent and it was fine---no holes from flying rock.

I spent the rest of the summer driving an open-cab dump truck (called a Koehring
Mule) moving the broken rock to build a kind of causeway over a valley.

One of the items in my ever-growing list of things 'to do' before the grim reaper makes his call is to drive up to Britt and try to find that campsite.

I would like to just sit there, think about the big blast and about the couple who thought that a tent would protect them.

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See you on July 18th for Posting #78 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting, or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.