Ice road opens after troubled beginning
Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Feb 07/01) - A careful beginning has been made to the busiest winter road season.
On Saturday, a day after a plan to send up three light loads was delayed at the last minute to give a little more time for the ice to thicken, a Nuna Logistics transport hauling an empty water truck made its way across the lakes and portages of the Lupin winter road.
"She was a little bit scary, but there wasn't too much movement in the ice," said Ross Curlew, who drove the first run.
Curlew's trip north began at 8 a.m. and ended at Nuna Logistic's Lac de Gras camp just over 16 hours later.
Sunday another 15 light loads were released by the two-person committee that manages the road. As of yesterday, three loads were being released every hour.
The season began only after days of pressure-packed debate over whether the ice covering the lakes could handle the traffic.
Balanced off against the threat of breaking through the ice that covers 80 per cent of the 567 kilometre route, is the pressure of getting a record 7,362 loads of equipment, supplies and fuel to the diamond fields and Echo Bay's Lupin Mine.
"Safety is our number one priority and we will not put anybody on that road in unsafe conditions," said Ian Goodwin, BHP's representative on the management committee that administers the road.
Nuna Logistics operations manager Pat McHale said trucking companies contracted to get a certain number of loads up the road can push too hard sometimes.
"It's like they don't believe you," said McHale. "I mean, what do you want to do, take your truck on 19 inches of ice?"
Marvin Robinson, co-owner of RTL Robinson Transport, which has contracted to haul 4,000 loads up the road this season, said ice conditions this year are nothing new. Robinson suggested that if RTL was building the road it would have opened sooner.
"We're the guys that taught them (to build the road)," said Robinson. "We built winter roads for the last 33 years."
Echo Bay initially contracted RTL to build the road when it was building the Lupin mine. That arrangement ended up in a protracted court battle.
Opening the road two weeks later than last year has cost RTL "a ton in men and equipment," Robinson said.
RTL has contracted to build spurs from the ice road to Kennady Lake and Windspear this season.
Determining when the road is safe to travel on and how much of a load it can support is not an exact science.
As a general rule it takes 32 inches of ice for a full legal load, 34-36 inches to support a B-train transport. But that guideline assumes the ice is good. This year it's been anything but.
As recently as last Tuesday, four pick-up trucks stopping on a suspect section of road were cause for concern for a crew measuring the thickness of the ice.
Kirk McLellan, Echo Bay's representative on the management committee, does not respond well to outside pressure to open the road as soon as possible. He said any pressure RTL is feeling has more to do with the company's trucking capacity than the capacity of the ice road season.
McLellan said he relies almost completely on the observations of those supervising construction of the road.
The 107 people working for Nuna Logistics are headed up by a core of ice road veterans that are carry-overs from the days when Echo Bay built the road. For them this time of year there's two topics of conversation -- the ice and the weather. Their experience is apparent in the way they talk about both.
Referring to the effect of the unseasonable warmth over Christmas, 14-year Lupin road veteran Martin Janssen talks about the ice as if it is a living thing.
"(The warm spell) brings in cracks and she's bleeding and won't heal," said Janssen.
It may not be alive, but the ice is far more dynamic than the surface of any other road.
It flexes beneath the wheels of the transports, emitting a nerve-fraying cracking that accompanies the drivers on their slow haul to the mines.
And slow it is. Right now trucks are limited to 20 kilometres per hour on the troublesome ice along the southern half of the road 30 kilometres per hour on the northern half. They slow to a crawl along the portages. The speed limit is enforced by a crew of security guards on the road.
Though the security guards do not have the authority to ticket any drivers, they can record the large identification number posted in the front window of each truck before it goes on the road. As a rule, drivers caught speeding twice are finished for the season.
"That's the one thing you need up here is patience," advised Curlew. "If you don't have patience, you shouldn't be here."
