As you can see from the photo's, Donny Wagner broke through the ice on a little pot-hole just south of the then' Lockhart Lake rest camp' on Feb 10th 1986, almost 23 years ago today. He was carrying between 8 & 10 thousand imp gallons of diesel fuel in his B Train tanks. When the tanks broke through their full weight landed on the dispensing manifolds beneath the tanks and broke them, spilling his load all over the ice, surrounding snow and into the small lake. The brown stuff you see on the ice is mostly diesel fuel.

 

It took us, using several winch trucks, flat bed/drop down trailers and some ingenuity, most of a day to free the tanks from the ice, the tractor being lighter, of course did not break through and was easy to move out of the way. The hardest part of the operation was unhooking the tanks from each other and the tractor.....everything was torqued over, twisted and partly below the ice. The tanks were severely damaged but Donny's tractor, apart from his fuel tanks wasn't too badly hurt.

 

Before recovery work could begin and so that ice road traffic could continue, a short detour portage and temporary bridge made of 6x6 lumber laid on top of the ice was built. Several weeks later I was given a box of dynamite, some caps and a roll of blasting wire and tasked with blowing the lumber out of the ice ready for salvage. To say the least, my instructions were pretty sketchy but in the spirit of 'get 'er dun' I said sure

 

I put the powder sticks in my pickup box under a tarp, stuck the caps under the seat and headed on out. As soon as I got to the spot I could see that the plan wasn't going to work. One of two things was going to happen (a) the lumber was going to get blown to bits or (b) as the lumber bridge was the strongest part, when I set the dynamite off the blast force was just going to dissipate sideways out under the ice into the lake, or straight up and down into the air and water. I drilled some ice holes with my auger, set some experimental charges, ran out the cable, retreated to a safe distance and touched the wires to the pickup battery. Bang! I saw a couple of ice geysers shoot up over the trees, but no lumber. Okay lets go see what happened. Well what happened, was not much. As I figured the blast force went straight up and down, it had barely made my auger holes any bigger.

 

I was by myself without any one to help, offer suggestions or encouragement........... so thinking 'effit, I'm outa here!', I hopped back in my pickup and buggered off to Lockhart for lunch.

 

Two weeks later while my pickup was in the shop for a service, one of the mechanics happened to look under the diesel and gasoline soaked tarp in the back. He was very surprised to find half a case of diesel and gasoline soaked dynamite.............. upon returning from my three day patrol and futile blasting attempt, in the middle of the night, I'd gone straight home to bed. By next morning I'd forgotten about the dynamite.... my bad! Dick was really pissed off at me, I can't say I blame him for being so.

 

We had a rock quarry operation going on out on the Highway to Rae, one of the driller/blasters was kind enough to dispose of the bad and now unstable dynamite, down the shot holes of his next scheduled blast.