Margin for error on winter road becoming paper thin
Richard Gleeson
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Feb 05/01) - "It's terrible," says Martin Janssen. "It's the worst year we've ever had."
Janssen supervises the southern half of the Lupin winter road, a job that involves more risk each year.
The length of the shipping season has remained roughly two months during the 18 years the ice road has been used to resupply Echo Bay's Lupin gold mine and, more recently, the Lac de Gras diamond fields.
But during that time the thickness of the lake ice, and with it the margin for error Janssen and the people who work for him have to operate within, has been steadily dwindling.
"We have 14 inches less ice than this time last year," said Pat McHale.
McHale, operations manager, and Janssen work for Nuna Logistics, the company contracted by Echo Bay to build and maintain the ice road.
The pressure to open the ice road has also increased. With the emergence of mega diamond mines like Ekati and Diavik the number of loads using the road has increased sevenfold. This season will be the busiest ever, with 7,362 hauls scheduled.
Ice road construction techniques have changed to cope with the thinning layer that supports loads of up to 120,000 tonnes.
At one time ice thickness was checked by drilling a hole every five kilometres or so along the 567 kilometre route.
Today crews like Doug Coulton and Jamie Wakeham use a sonar device to check every metre for 'spikes'- thin sections of ice caused by shoals or currents.
"We were out here on the first day, before there was even a footprint in the snow," said Coulton.
The profiler is dragged behind a Land Rover. For profiling the riskier southerly stretches of road Nuna Logistics uses a tracked, amphibious army vehicle known as a Haglund.
Gone are the days when graders and plow trucks were the only vehicles used to clear the snow.
Warmer temperatures make clearing snow from the ice critical. Without an insulating layer of snow, ice thickens by as much as three centimetres every 24 hours in temperatures of -35 C or colder.
Last year Nuna began using snow cats to do the initial plowing. As an extra safety measure, the small tracked vehicles sport two four-metre steel outriggers to prevent them from sinking should they break through.
"We're going lighter and lighter all the time," said McHale.
Despite the change, three snow cats broke through the ice this year. One of the cat drivers, Guyle Armstrong, died as a result his Dec. 22 plunge into the frigid lake waters. Armstrong was the second fatality in the years the road has been built and the first to be caused by breaking through the ice.
Armstrong's death, which is being investigated by the Workers Compensation Board, weighs heavily on the minds of everyone working on the road, and no heavier than on the mind of Janssen, who witnessed it.
"I tell you, some nights I don't get much sleep," he said.
