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Digger Man

Digger Man Blog

by Nick Drew  |  Mon 16 Oct 2017

Memory of the month the way things were. (Part Seventeen)

Continuing our series featuring the memoirs of retired plant man William (Bill) Peters, with period photos supplied by Bill and the Digger Man Blog archives.

Memory of the month the way things were. (Part Seventeen)

Canada No 2

When I started loading dumpers we were cutting through thirty feet of solid granite with four drilling rigs running day and night, there were no levels to work to so I asked the superintendent for some and a glazed look passed across his face as if to say no one ever asked for those before, anyway he called up the engineers who came right away. In those days we were in the transition period in England between imperial and metric measurement so I would always ask on a new site which system they were using, in Canada they said they were using imperial so they said keep three feet below the tapes tied to sticks. Well I worked all day and the night shift carried on at the level I had started, in the morning I kept going until mid-morning when the engineers returned, stopped me and said your running too deep, getting out my tape I said you told me three feet below the tapes and that’s exactly three feet, ah yes they said but we use ten inch feet so your six inches too deep. That was a new take on the metric system and that’s how one of the Mars landers failed, The Americans were using inches and the Europeans were using millimetres, we live and learn, don’t we!

 

One day the superintendent came to me and said you have to go back to camp to see the union man, they hadn’t told me I had to join the union, as I went into the office I could sense immediate hostility, he said what do you operate, I replied anything, you name it I’ll run it, not here you don’t what are you on at the moment? a loader, you’re a loader operator it’s a $120 to join and $7 a week, even now that seems a lot but I’m sure that’s right. 

If companies needed operators they rang the union hall then they would send whoever was on the books in that particular category which is why their operators had such a restricted experience. It really was heavily unionised for instance a site flatbed with a crane on would require three persons, a teamster to drive it, an operating engineer to work the crane (me for instance) and a labourer to attach the load, here in England one man. Returning to our room at the end of a shift there was a hell of a noise coming from a room just up the corridor about six blokes were in there drinking and this went on all night and was still going on when we went out again at 06.00 having had no sleep.

When we returned at 12.00 for lunch the door to the room was hanging off the top hinge with an axe stuck through it, looking inside everything was matchwood smashed to pieces, it must have cost them several hundred dollars out of their pay to repair it. We were paid fortnightly and some of the men would start playing poker and there would be hundreds of dollars on the table so some won but others lost all their pay it one night, not too smart really.

Pictured above: Ominawin Camp 1974.

It was late August by now and one day the superintendent came to me and said we want you to be the principal operator, this meant I would operate any machine on site, if someone blew a shift I’d run his machine no matter what it was, I asked what’s in it for me, he said we can’t pay you anymore but you WILL be the last operator on site,  he then said we were going to make you earth moving superintendent but we figured you would be too hard on the men, funny how others see you as I thought I was pretty soft

.

Pictured above: Inside the living quarters at Ominawin Camp 1974.

In September Doug had some bad news, his mother had died suddenly and he had to go home but he had just come back from his ninety day leave period going over the Rockies by train and to America visiting the Caterpillar factory so he had spent most of his money, I loaned him C$460 for the air fares etc, I guessed he would pay me back some time and he did.

Photo Above: 30RB courtesy of Kees on Pinterest.

Around now they put me on a Bucyrus Eyrie 30B dragline a relatively small machine but a  new experience for me and it seemed quite simple really, I didn’t think of it at the time but they were trying me out to see if I could run it as a crane later on to dismantle the camp. The Co-Operator  

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