Project manager Erik Seraphim winces if you mention Hemlo in the same breath as Courageous Lake “This is no Hemlo,” he says patiently, then adds that “potentially, it could be a big one The tonnage is indicated The mineability is not This project is still in the exploration stage, though I have a hard time convincing people of that ” (Editor’s Note: This interview took place last summer )
Unlike the rest of the crew, who work four weeks and are then flown home for two weeks, Seraphim follows a 2-weeks-in/2-weeks-out schedule But his two weeks out are spent huddling with senior executives, engineers and accountants in Noranda’s head office Logistics can be a year- round nightmare at Courageous Lake Heavy equipment and cargo come in from Yellowknife over 370 km of winter road, which was originally built to serve Echo Bay’s Lupin gold mine For the Tundra project, the road has carried an assorted cargo — 2 5 million l of fuel, $670,000 worth of 8×8 shaft timbers up to 12 m long, and a 25,000-kg mine hoist It’s said that one Lupin convoy was lost for four days The sixth truck in another convoy went through the ice
Noranda got in more than 200 truckloads of supplies before break-up this spring The rest come in by air on scheduled Tuesday and Thursday flights — which may or may not arrive on Tuesdays and Thursdays Courageous Lake’s weather is notorious for its unpredictability and its ferocity
“Nobody comes here for the love of humanity, country or democracy,” says Thyssen’s project engineer, Andy Fearn, taking a futile swipe at yet another mosquito which has penetrated his office’s defences “They come here for the money * * * and they make a lot of it ”
Summer — nominally June to September, but never for sure — brings clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies, which find a happy haven in the thick, ground-hugging foliage, ponds and muskeg You don’t venture far without a supply of repellents and, after 7 p m , nothing helps much at all And the fog can settle in as thick as soup sometimes
During the winter, the wind is an almost constant companion At –35 degrees F, which is not unusual, a 60-km wind creates a flesh-cooling factor equivalent to –110 degrees F Facing into the fine, wind-driven snow is like taking a blast of buckshot in the face Sucking that super-chilled air into your lungs can freeze them solid No one lasts long without shelter Tundra’s crew had one close call last winter when two drillers set out for their rig just before a call came in to tell them that weather had cancelled work for the day They spent two hours blundering about the tundra by snowmobile before finally stumbling across the camp again They could just as easily have never found it
Thyssen had hoped to start work on the headframe and the collar of the shaft around April 1 It was bitterly cold in the last part of March (“You could freeze your eyeball to the instrument while you were trying to survey the shaft,” says shaft superintendent Dave Hamnett of Rivers, Man , shivering at the memory “I remember making it back to the shelter of the truck once and shaking so badly I couldn’t open the door “)
But they got the preliminary work done, the site laid out, cleared and levelled, by the end of March And they were all set to begin when an Easter blizzard hit “For two days there was nothing moving but the snow,” Hamnett says “We had one man working with a bulldozer at the shaft site, doing a bit of final preparation By noon that day, we couldn’t get to him to bring him in It was four days before we could really move about again ”
Then they had to clear up the site a second time before they could get started on the shaft collar After all the trouble getting going, no one was taking chances when the blasting crew detonated its first charge “Everyone drove a mile away, as if they didn’t trust us,” Hamnett laughs “But there was just a little puff of smoke, some flying frozen mud and a bang ”
By April 10, they were pouring their first concrete and still fighting savage weather Fearn well remembers April 10 “It was horrible,” he says “The crew put up hoardings (for protection against the wind) The wind sent them flying We ripped the gravel out of a nearby esker with a bulldozer, in big, frozen chunks and tried to thaw it with hot water We couldn’t We wound up running lengths of 10-inch steel pipe diagonally through the gravel and building coal fires inside the pipes That worked
“One poor guy was standing on the cement mixer, trying to pour the cement in He’d open a bag and the cement would simply vanish He came into the office afterwards both wind- burned and burned by the cement We tried to spell the guys off as often as possible, but it was really tough ”
By July 4, the headframe was finished Shaft-blasting started that day and 10 days later, at a depth of 28 m, work was right on schedule
As tough as the work is, Seraphim and most of the men under him have no desire to get into the production end of mining “I`m a project man When you’re in charge of a project like this, you live and breathe it 24 hours a day ” But working this far north does take its toll “You can tell when someone’s going out on leave,” says Seraphim, “he’s biting his earlobes off, he’s smiling so hard ” Erik Watt is a freelance writer based in Yellowknife, N W T This article first appeared in “Up Here: Life in Canada’s North,” a magazine published by Outcrop, The Northern Publishers
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