Drill Bits and Dynamite....Part Fifteen...Sea to Sky Segment One....Cut 5
Cut 5 wasn't the biggest or the nastiest piece of blasting work on the Sea to Sky project. It was however perched directly above the ferry terminal ticket booths at Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver...all 40,000 cubic meters of it. The usual way to blast, is to start at the "free'" face and send the blast outwards. As powerful as the explosives are, they have their limits on what can be accomplished. Shooting to a "free" face, allows the rock to easily move away from the wall behind. Blasting to a "free" face also greatly minimizes the vibration in the ground when the shot is fired...and offers much more control of fly-rock. Loading a Cut 5 pre-shear blast The roll of green stuff that looks like garden hose...is actually a very high strength explosive The way that Cut 5 was situated, prevented us from doing things the usual way. There were two reasons for this. One was that the ticket booths were in the direct line of fire, if we shot aw...