Mike Pearson's Adventures on a Pale Blue Dot

"> Here are a few blasting videos that I recovered from an old disc. There are more images that just need to be recover and processed...it'll just take time. The link is at the bottom...  The first video is at the Cut 10 area, beside the highway. We put the excavator bucket over the shot to keep the blast mats from flying into the air...and into the fiber-optic line...or over the bluff and down 100 feet. The other shots are a Eagleridge (Cut 4 )...one of the small ones is a bit of a dud...where the shock-tube got broken when the blast mats were put on. It's called a "cut-off".....not dangerous...just a piss-off ( it takes a ton of time to re-attach everything...and put the mats back on. The larger Cut 4 shots...are only matted on the Upper Levels Highway side...to control the amount of fly-rock coming over that way. The highway was closed by our traffic control people also, as an extra precaution. Some of the larger shots ( which I hope to post...

The first major blasting job in Segment One ( West Vancouver ) of the Sea to Sky Highway Improvement Project. On the south side of the Upper Levels Highway, we need to blast and dig a road, so that a large retaining wall can be built. The interesting factors are.... a very busy highway right beside us....and a steep drop off that leads directly to houses and a road below us. The first of the Tamrock Ranger 800 drills has now arrived, and this is the first test. No one on the crew has even touched one of these hi-tech machines before. The vendor, Traxxon is with us constantly during the early days of breaking in the drill and operators. Because we are so close to the highway and bridge structure, we dial down the hole size to 1 3/4" and use 1 1/4 dynamite for a kinder, gentler blast. Large rubber blast mats are used on every shot. We over-did it with the mats on most shots, because we were only waiting for gaps in traffic before pushing the go button. We really couldn't afford ...