4/1/2023 0 Comments Diamond ice driverTim Tattrie, a professional technologist with a 28-year career in the Canadian military, who came to NUNA Logistics Ltd. First built in 1982 to carry about 800 loads a year into the now-mothballed Lupin Mine, today it routinely sees ten times that number, and far greater volumes, in the same eight-week season to the Ekati, Diavik and Snap Lake mines. The TCWR is more accurately an “ice” road, and it has evolved remarkably to meet its challenges. But there are differences between “winter” roads - built with packed snow almost entirely over frozen land, and “ice” roads built mostly on water. Winter roads are essential to remote communities, resource and tourism camps that otherwise may have only summer/water resupply, or air transport that costs about eight times more than a truck. So just what makes it so safe and dependable? In short, decades of innovative experience, high-tech science, close cooperation, and a corporate culture that will not tolerate risk to the health and safety of its workers. “While accidents are rare, when they have occurred they have been relatively minor, given the very slow speed of travel regulated on the road, proper security, and good training,” says the road’s website. That’s 6.4 million kilometers driven in eight weeks in the dead of winter. Still, when the scale of the project is sized up, it does gives one pause: 600 kilometres in all, 80 per cent on ice 8,000 round trips of about 800 kilometres each 500 drivers. “What was portrayed in that television series does not have a lot to do with how we manage and operate the TCWR.” “The road is probably the safest road in North America,” says Ron Near, Director of Operations for the iconic 420 kilometre Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road (TCWR) from Yellowknife to the NWT’s three big diamond mines. Lured by the History Channel’s wildly successful Ice Road Truckers television series, viewers around the world have been “astonished,” says one reviewer, by its dramatization of the exploits of daring drivers turbocharged on money-lusting bravado. Not so, say veterans of the real thing - the Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road. De Beers, on the other hand, is the majority owner of the Gahcho Kué, the world’s largest new diamond mine.įigures released by the Natural Diamond Council show that the diamond industry contributes around 25% of the GDP of the Northwest Territories and that since 1996, the industry has spent more than $23 billion in procurement from NWT and Indigenous-owned businesses.Call it another urban myth about the Arctic: driving a 50-tonne fuel tanker on a metre of cracking black ice over bone-chilling water is just about the scariest, dumbest thing you could ever do. It retained, however, a 40% stake in the Diavik diamond mine, operated by 60% partner Rio Tinto. During the few weeks the road is open, they use it to deliver up to 10,000 loads of essential supplies and equipment to their respective operations.ĭominion used to be the owner of Canada’s first diamond mine, Ekati, but it recently sold it to the Arctic Canadian Diamond Company. The Ice Road has been jointly run by three mining companies – Diavik Diamond Mines, Dominion Diamond Corporation, and De Beers Canada – for over 20 years since the start of Canada’s diamond rush in 1999. Where there are problem-lake areas with thinner ice, speed limits reduce to 15 kilometres per hour for trucks and if the ice on a stretch of road needs to be thickened, water trucks are called in to add water to that specific area. Once the initial test has been aced, the ice-thickness needs to get to 39 inches so that the road can open up to full load capacity. The vehicle is specially designed to float if it falls through the ice and tows an ice-thickness-detecting sonar. When this happens, an amphibious Hägglund army-type reconnaissance vehicle is the first one to drive along the road’s entire length. Opening takes place normally in February or March once it has reached a minimum of 29 inches of ice. The route is officially known as the Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road (TCWR) and every year, construction begins in December. In fact, according to the Natural Diamond Council, the Ice Road is considered the safest road in North America, due to the lack of traffic. Although the location where the story takes place is real, the plot does not depict a true story or the actual working conditions (besides the below zero temperatures) in which miners operate in the region.
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