Drill Bits and Dynamite Part Eight.....more Cut 14 Tales

Cut 14 is the area that was featured in the "Helicopters and Dynamite" story. This section of work was at the very north end of Segment One of the S2S Highway project. It featured very tall, steep rock bluffs that had to be sliced and diced to make room for a wider roadway.
 This requires that we as the blasting crew have to do "pioneering" work, to get up on top of the rock features, so that we can drill down vertically for the actual cuts. In some cases, horizontal blast holes ( lifters ) can be used to minimize trail building, but it is extremely hard to control lifter shots. Lifter shots create lots of unpredictable fly-rock, more vibration and more noise than properly planned vertical hole shots. ( we did use lifter shots on Cut 9 and 10, when there was no alternative....and nothing to hit with the fly rock )

330 Cat excavator up on a pioneer trail that's only as wide as the machine. Placing blast mats on to a prepared shot. This is Cut 14...looking south. Power-lines and fiber-optic cables close by. Active highway right below.

The traffic rules on when we could stop cars and for how long...varied greatly. It depended on time of day, which day of the week, pre and post holidays and of course the holidays themselves. Some days we were allowed NO stops. None. On other days it could be from 2 to 20 minutes, with 1000 dollar per minute fines for running into overtime. During the slow season, we could close the highway at night for two separate closures of two hours each...for a four hour total ...with a one hour opening in between.

 We would push as hard as we could to get work done in smaller windows of opportunity than I would have ever imagined. The upper bench at Cut 14 was so narrow that the excavator didn't have enough room to spin around. Every time that it needed to reverse, one of the blasters would have to guide him back with hand signals and radio calls.

As a lot of the work took place at night, this operation, high above the road on a narrow ledge was a little hairy at times. Each blast mat had to be carried in along this ledge, and the operator guided back each time. Six or eight mats, six or eight trips back and forth. If we were in a really shitty/risky spot...then we could only move the machine and mats in a traffic closure, to minimize the chance of dropping something on a passer-by....like a 7000 lb blast mat, or a 90,000 excavator.

Hanging the blast mats on steel pins that we installed using the reach of the hoe-drill. In this pic, you can see one of the rock-scalers up in the tree line. They would rappel down on ropes to attach the blast mats to the pins, working closely and carefully with the excavator operator. The hoe is going to stay in place during the shot to keep the mats and rocks from flying into the power-lines and fiber-optic cable.

 The whole trick of doing the blasting in this area, was to put the correct amount of explosives into the shot. Just enough to get it to break and fall away from the wall, but not so much that it launches across the road and tears out the power-lines near-by.

 We controlled this part by only using two blasters to do most of the work here. They knew the "recipe" for success and could be trusted to do the right thing time after time. We also took a team approach on the higher risk stuff and consulted with each other to get a clear view of which techniques were working best at the moment. ( as the rock conditions change, the drill pattern, explosives load, detonation timing and mat protection all changes with it )

Looking north towards Ansell Place/Seascapes

The excavator heading out to the end of the bench...once there...the bench is actually narrower than the machine, and the tracks hang over the edge.

When it came time for a blast, the traffic people would close the highway They would tell us what the last car coming through was, and when it passed and was clear....push the button...boom. It all collapses to the road below...and the loader rushes in to remove the debris within the allotted time of the closure. It's possible, when everything goes well, to do a shot...and clean it up...in five minutes. It's not pretty, but it can be done.

Whatever material that stays up on the bench, has to get swept over on to the road for the loader to pick up. The excavator has very little room to swing before it rubs the rock face. Usually a spotter would work with the operator to keep him safe.

Night work at Cut 14 was very exciting. It was winter, bitterly cold and wet. Working on a narrow bench under tower lights and the lights of the hoe. One night we had an especially tall, chunky blast to do. The volume of rock that was going to come down was fairly big. The height of the shot above the road, meant that it was going to splash all over the place when it came down. This in turn meant that big pieces could rocket into the power pole across the road...or worst case scenario...send the mats flying through the air, and into the wires ....all of this is bad stuff, and doesn't look good on anyone's resume.

Video here of cut 14 blasting with bast mats....then on to Cut 5 pre-shear shot

 So...on this particular night, we drilled gently and loaded conservatively....only a couple mats could be hung on the shot, we didn't have the ability to reach any further. The end result was a good shot...except for the huge chunk of rock that landed on the highway. The good news is that nothing flew into the wires or pole...the bad news was that a massive rock was laying in the road at 3 a.m.

Working up on the Cut 14 bench on a winters night....the path is narrow...and tall rock face on the operators side...and a nasty drop to the road on the other side. The blaster and operator have to work together to keep each other safe....bad things happen when that doesn't work out.

Placing blast mats at night...hauling them down the path one at a time.

I'm pretty sure that this was the coldest/crappiest winter that I spent in the blasting biz....just looking at this picture, makes me feel cold and wet.

And there we are with a massive boulder sitting on the highway. The 450 John Deere excavator (a large one for the uninitiated)...struggled to move it.

We tugged and pulled while the front-end loader cleaned up the the smaller debris. In the end...we had to get the front-end loader to push on the rock, while the hoe hoe pulled. We dragged it to a spot where we could get it off the pavement. It was later drilled and blasted into more manageable pieces. We did leave some pretty nasty divots in the road surface...both from the blast rock landing on the road, and our dragging the big boulder away.

The 450 Hoe, driller/blaster Mike Trufanenko and the rubber tired loader....all ready to give a heave-ho on that stubborn hunk of rock

I was amazed at the residents in the Seascapes development..... They never once complained about the noise of our work...really right outside their windows. We worked all night long with rock drills, hydraulic breakers and the constant bleeting of back-up alarms. Some of the blasts took place at one, two or three in the morning...and were fairly loud, and hit pretty hard. Not one person said a word. The only thing that pissed them off was if we left a mess, or marks on the blacktop of their driveway...then we got an ear full.