In the end, the engineers chose a hydraulic lift method. Mechanical means of moving the dredge were explored. Parks Canada approached 1 Construction Engineering Unit (1CEU), a Canadian military unit stationed in Winnipeg, which agreed to oversee the project. A series of engineering studies recommended that the dredge be moved to higher ground. The tailings stacker and the stern section appeared to be moving upward, but the cause of the problem was buried from view. The dredge was donated to Parks Canada by the company in December of 1969 and was subsequently designated as a national historic site.ĭuring the 1970s, cracks began appearing in the massive structure. The operations of the YCGC came to an end in 1966 after 60 years. The ground in, around, and beneath the hull froze. Year after year, the spring floods washed over the hull, filling it up with silt until the dredge was buried in almost six metres of sediment. The following spring, a dam collapsed upstream, sending a wall of water down the creek. The dredge worked its way up Bonanza Creek until it was shut down at the end of the season in 1959. Overseen by a team of engineers, the reconstruction involved modifications to enable it to dig deeper.
The aging dredge was disassembled in 1940 by the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corporation (YCGC), and the old machinery was installed on a new superstructure at the lower end of Bonanza Creek, a few kilometres outside of Dawson City. 4 worked its way slowly down the Klondike valley. To make it even more difficult, the dredge was filled with silt and locked in frozen ground.īuilt near the mouth of the Klondike River in 1913, and operated by Joe Boyle’s Canadian Klondyke Mining Company, No. This project presented a number of problems for one thing, no one had ever attempted to move a decaying derelict dredge this big before. How do you move a historic artifact seven storeys high, two-thirds the length of a football field and weighing as much as 1,900 automobiles? This was the unique engineering challenge posed by Dredge No.
0 kommentar(er)
