Adventures on a Pale Blue Dot: Drill Bits and Dynamite....Part Twenty Two ..Helicopter and Hydro

This is during the Sea to Sky project. Several power poles in between Cut 4 and 5 needed to be replaced with taller poles. The new overland section of the highway in this area was getting built up by about 40 feet. The old poles would not have given enough clearance.
This video and others has been hidden away on old mini-discs for all the years since this job. My writer/photographer/videographer friend managed to recover the files. There will be some new blasting videos coming shortly.

Hydro truck setting up on the lower side of the job. These are the poles that are right above the ferry terminal parking lot.

The guys on this power-pole job were fantastic to work with. Friendly, outgoing and totally professional without the posturing that sometimes goes with big boy macho work. It's important to keep in mind the extreme danger involved in this type of work. A mechanical failure in the helicopter at the wrong time...is going to ruin the day for a lot of people. A broken lift line, same thing. The workers on the ground could get hit by the multi-ton power pole as it swings into place. Something as simple as getting hit by flying debris from the down-wash could be disastrous.

One of the interesting side stories goes like this...We were lifting the poles and cross beams from the Eagleridge parking lot. It was relatively close to the Upper Levels Highway and especially Exit 2 . The pilot Jeff Brown wanted us to stop traffic while he was lifting the poles, in the event that anything went wrong, and he needed extra room to move.
Usually it's not a problem to stop traffic for a bit. But because the big helicopters had been so busy on other jobs, we were working on a day that didn't permit any extended stops. We needed the big Bell 214 to do the work, or we would lose it for weeks to someone else...so we went ahead and stopped traffic anyways while Jeff was lifting the poles out of the parking lot. We had all of our official traffic people in place...and I think that the M.O.T. people were on side.
The fur started to fly when the Horseshoe Bay ferry terminal manager figured out that we were stopping traffic from getting to the terminal ( for a few minutes at a time ) He got a hold of me (because he had my number...and I was dumb enough to answer the phone)...he just completely went ape-shit over the traffic delays and the fact that we weren't really allowed to stop traffic at all. I explained that we had only a small window of opportunity with the helicopter company. He wasn't even slightly impressed.
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I phoned my project manager to tell him the happy news. ( I'll leave his name out of this, I think he is happily employed and wants to stay that way ) He asked for the details of what we needed to do to finish and then said that he would get in touch with the ferry manager and try to calm him down. The mathematics of the situation allowed him to shrug off the threatened fines...the helicopter crew, Hydro crew and our people were running well over 10,000 dollars per hour. A fine of several thousand dollars was a small thing compared to completing a critical piece of work.

Later in the afternoon, when I had to go down into the terminal traffic line-up to clear a safety zone for installing poles right above the parking lot, nobody said a word. The ferry traffic flaggers helped me to keep travelers out of the danger zone while the Bell 214 rumbled overhead to place two poles. It must have been a very exiting day for drivers waiting for the ferry.

Tail-gate meeting and getting the tools

The Hydro guy in the video, Frank, whose last name I don't recall....was a super guy to work with. He became my Hydro contact for times when we needed to work with or around Hydro. A few times I called him and his crew when we had high risk blast to do. It works in everybody's best interest to have the Hydro guys around if there's a chance that our work might affect their gear. ( as in a blast tearing out the poles or wires )....luckily we didn't need their repair services, but it was good to have them just in case.