http://www.alaskadispatch.com/
A late March blizzard has finished blowing over much of Canada’s Northwest Territories and Ron Near’s job just got more interesting. A retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, Near is in charge of the world’s longest ice road that connects Yellowknife, the territorial capital, to three diamond mines: Ekati, Diavik and Snap Lake.
The Tibbit to Contwoyto Winter Road – named after the first and the last lakes on the ice road – is a joint venture between BHP Billiton, which owns the Ekati Mine, the Diavik Diamond Mines Inc., which manages the Diavik mine, and DeBeers, which owns the Snap Lake Mine.
The ice road is the only overland resupply route for the mines. They depend on it to truck in a year’s worth of supplies and equipment: everything from diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate for mine explosives to earth moving machines.
And with the ice road open only eight to 10 weeks every year, resupplying the mines is a monumental logistical undertaking executed with military precision.
But on this particular day the entire Tibbit to Contwoyto winter road is snowed in and the window of opportunity to move tens of thousands of tons of materiel and supplies just got a whole lot narrower.
“We have 98 trucks at Lockhart Camp, which is about half-way up the winter road, that’s our main rest stop,” Near said pointing the location of the camp on a large map hanging on the wall of his office.
The camp has hot meal facilities, washers and dryers for the drivers, showers – anything that the drivers might get at a conventional truck stop anywhere else in North America, except this one is located right in the middle of the Arctic wilderness, almost at the edge of the treeline.
RELATED: Facts and figures about the Ice Road to Diamonds
“When we see a storm starting to develop, we’ll track it,” Near said. “And once it looks like it’s going to get bad we start funnelling trucks into the different camps.”
Now he has to figure out how to get everything moving again and make up precious time the winter storm stole from them.
‘The longest school zone in the world’
The ice road begins at Tibbitt Lake at the end of the narrow and winding Ingram Trail, about 60 kilometres (36 miles) east of Yellowknife. From there, it snakes up north over frozen lakes and short overland stretches, called portages. These days it goes only as far north as the Ekati mine. But up until 2008 the ice road used to go to the now closed Jericho diamond mine on Contwoyto Lake, in south-western Nunavut.
With most of it laid over lake ice, the road must be rebuilt each year, Near said. Construction usually starts shortly after Christmas each year. And it takes five to six weeks to have the road ready by the last week in January, he said.
During construction, special amphibious tracked vehicles, Hagglunds, measure the ice thickness every day, Near said. Construction crews clear the snow and drill holes in the ice to flood certain areas and build up ice thickness to a point when it can take the weight of a fully loaded freighter truck.
When the ice reaches 107 cms (42 inches) along the entire 400-kilometre road, it is thick enough for a super B tanker, hauling two tanks of fuel weighing approximately 41-42 tonnes in total, Near said.
Fully loaded trucks are allowed to travel at a maximum speed of 25 km/h and have to maintain a distance of 500 metres between each other, Near said. On some “problem” lakes, where ice is not thick enough, the speed limit is reduced to 15 km/h.
For the rest of this article, please go to the Alaska Dispatch website: http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/remote-canadian-diamond-mines-rely-supply-worlds-longest-ice-road