Mike Pearson's Adventures on a Pale Blue Dot

Blasting on the Sea to Sky Highway project, Segment one in West Vancouver. Deyna Gillis used his computer tech skills to help me recover videos from old mini-discs. This little clip features blasts from Cut 4, Cut 5, 10 and 14. The blast with the 769 haul truck so close...was because the truck had a major drive-line breakdown and was going to be in the way for a while. The blasts in Cut 4 didn't really toss big rocks too badly...so we had the mechanics raise the steel dump box to protect the cab. No damage done. The blast with the excavator holding the mats down...is a technique used when the conditions are right to keep the blast mats from sliding away....sometimes far far away. Like I said...when the conditions are right. This is above Cut 10...right beside the old Squamish highway....60 meters down to the railroad tracks on the bottom side. Fiber-optic lines right above ( expensive to tear up ) The fairly large shot that is flinging blast mats around is at Cut 4...fairly c...

"> 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...