By: Bob Adner

I’d like you to indulge me for a moment while I recall my job working for Channel Constructers, the company operating the crushers, sand plant and shipping bins. My job was the only one of its kind on the entire project. You wrote in your book about how the crushers were the largest in the world.  The throat of the crushers would accept a rock eleven feet long, five feet wide and four feet thick. And the operators tried to get bigger ones through there. Naturally they got stuck about halfway down and the only way to get them loose was with dynamite. That was my job, blast the rock loose without damaging the crusher. I was one of the few blasters on the project that carried a private license. A good friend of mine that worked for MCS on the face of the gorge Tommy Rink was going to get his but never followed through on it.  He was from Hornell NY and I’ve always wondered what became of him. We worked together for three years on the St. Lawrence Seaway and came down here together.

The crushers consisted of a steel box with two impellers inside that weighed three tons each and turned at the speed of 1800 rpm. Each one had three breaker bars on them that were four feet long and eight inches thick. These bars flung the rocks against the inside of the crusher against other breaker bars. After the stockpiles were built up they would shut the crushers down on the third shift so the welders could resurface the breaker bars.

One of the engineers from Uhl-Hall and Rich ran a time study on the speed of the operation from the bottom of the forebay to the rock coming off the belt of the crushers. They came up with the figures that when one of the crushers was down it was costing the entire operation 27 dollars per minute. With the crushers down The Payhaulers were down, the shovels in the hole were down and the cleanup dozers on the floor of the forebay were down. And I got my time down about two-and one-half minutes to open a crusher. I carried a quarter stick of 40 per cent in one pocket and a zero delay blasting cap in the other. Talk about living

life dangerously.

Sorry to take up your time reminiscing but there are many good stories to be told!