Up the Gatineau! Article
This article was first published in Up the Gatineau! Volume 25.
Operation Clean Bottom: Muscle and $40,000 Clean the Gatineau River in 1977
Ernie Mahoney
In 1943, at the height of World War II, there was an increasing shortage of lumber for domestic use in Canada. Most resources were directed to the war effort, and this included the men and machinery used to harvest wood for timber. What wood was available was rationed, with the exception of wood obtained from sources other than the forests.
While this may seem a bit of a contradiction, it is explained by the fact that there was an adequate supply of logs already harvested but unavailable for processing at the usual sawmills. The “logs” were in fact deadheads, floating partly submerged in the Ottawa River between the Deschénes Rapids and the Champlain Bridge. On the desolate Quebec-side shore somewhere below what was then the Connaught Race Track, a small portable sawmill was erected and operated by a crew which harvested deadheads from the river and converted them to lumber. At the tender age of 12 years it was fun for me to sail the canoe over from the McKellar shore, where I lived, to watch the men at work. After all, it was a long summer, and the sawmill was about the only new adventure to be had for my gang.
Fast-forward twenty-one years to the Gatineau River, and the summer of 1964. I owned a Y-4, the oldest sailboat of her class still afloat. With a hull 18 feet long and about 6 feet on the beam, it was a target for just about everything that floated or was partially sub- , merged, especially the dreaded deadhead. Still, over several seasons’ sailing, the worst damage was much scraped paint and the odd dent from contact with the deadheads.
It was at repair time, prior to spring launch in 1977, that I remembered the sawmill lumber operation of my boyhood. This date also coincided with my early retirement, the search for some gainful employment, and the advent of the Canada Works Program. Thus, the idea of Operation Clean Bottom was conceived to improve the ecology of the river by getting rid of deadheads and perhaps to go into the lumber business by establishing a sawmill. About $150,000 was estimated to be required for the proposed project. This ambitious scheme did not meet favour with the bureaucrats administering the Canada Works Program and the application was refused.
About a week after receiving their rejection, 1 was surprised to get a phone call from the Canada Works administration. They had a surplus of $40,000 that could be made available on the condition that there would be no sawmill (there were too many in the area already), and I would need to hire a minimum of eight employees through the Hull Unemployment Insurance office. A revised plan was quickly put together that excluded the mill but still included a tug boat and barge. Of course we sourced the boat and barge from the Gatineau Boom Division of Canadian International Paper (CIP).
The first challenge was to find some seed money because the grant cheque, paid in increments, would not come through for a few weeks. With signed contract in hand, my first visit was to a bank manager who had been highly recommended. His reaction to my request for a bridging loan of $10,000 was something that [ hadn't expected, especially since I had a gold-plated introduction. I was practically thrown out of his office as a mad hippie, contract notwithstanding. Incidentally, the bank was named after a province.
With the mobilization of heavy equipment (30-foot tughoat and 50-foot barge) soon to be trucked from Gatineau to Chelsea, the shortage of dollars was put to the back of my mind. Over-Nite Express, the movers, said that they would invoice later. The very morning of the equipment move, with minutes to spare, I stopped at my post box to discover a $10,000 cheque from the Canada Works folk. Not wanting to carry it around, I stopped on my way to Gatineau at the Royal Bank branch in Place Limbour, asked for the Manager, explained the problem (moving tugs and barges, etc.), thrust the $10,000 into his hand and told him I'd be back in a couple of days to set up the required bank account. He later told me that the staff joked about it as being somewhat of a bank robbery in reverse. Needless to say, my relations were much better with this bank than the first one. But then again, cold hard cash has a voice of its own.
Moving the equipment from the Gatineau depot of CIP had its own snags and delays too. The steel frame of the eastbound lane of the Draveur bridge proved to be too low for the superstructure of the tug. It was necessary to ask for police assistance to divert traffic to be able to use the adjacent one-way span, an activity that took about two hours, but it was smooth sailing after that along the road to the Gatineau Boom camp near the Chelsea dam. Getting the heavy tug and the barge into the water required the services of a 50-ton crane, which made the lift with ease.
Later that day, the tug’s captain, Telesphore Dubois, took over the boat. He had just retired from Gatineau Boom after spending more than 40 years on the Gatineau River, and would prove to be a godsend to the operation with his infinite knowledge of the river. The tug towed the barge to its mooring in Kirk's Ferry, adjacent to the Gatineau River Yacht Club. The barge would also act as the dock and operating headquarters after the crew built a cabin and office on it.
The original plan called for mounting a small crane on the barge, and using the crane to lift the deadheads and sunken logs that were part of the salvage operation. Finding a crane proved futile, at least at a cost compatible with the project's budget, so a revised plan was put into effect at the suggestion of Captain Dubois. Instead of using the barge, Dubois had rafts constructed from boom timbers provided by the Boom Company. These were 40 by 40 feet, and could be towed behind the tug. They were also easily loaded because they were at water level. Of course, the salvaged logs had to be cut to four-foot lengths, as they were going to be used for pulp wood. Once cut, they were piled strategically for balance so that the rafts could be towed from one location to another.
The best part of May was taken up with mobilization. This included moving the equipment, installing a two-radio system for communications, building the headquarters cabin and rafts, and attending to an inventory of tools (CIP loaned or rented pike-poles, picaroons and other assorted gear, including life jackets and hard hats). May was also a time to get to know the crew and how they reacted to working together. There was absolutely no problem with the one woman member of the crew, who had beach-combing experience in British Columbia and could handle herself under every situation and frequently outworked the men. Unfortunately, early on in the first month one of the men had to be replaced because he was too frequently wet on the inside, which jeopardized the safety of the crew.
Crew safety was paramount and only on summer days, with the thermometer near 90°F did they take off their heavy life jackets and hard hats. It was surprising how many of the crew fell into the water on these hot summer days. The Captain only had one hard and fast rule: get off the water during an electrical storm. Rain was an annoyance, and sometimes the crew would wait out a morning rain, but if they were already on the river and it started to rain they would keep on working. After all, it was mostly the warm soft rain of summer!
The agreement with CIP was for the company to pay a salvage fee of $30 per cord of wood. As the grant was employment-based, it was forbidden to make a profit on the sale of the wood. The crew was paid bonuses calculated on the basis of the hours they worked to bring in the 300 cords collected during the summer. Each got about $500 extra when they signed off. Their weekly pay was about $115. In addition to Captain Dubois, the members of the crew were: Russ Byers, Patricia Doyle, Charlie Gachnang, Andre Gorka, Jack Hudon, Rory Munn, Gino Muto, Ben Renaud, Claude Robillard, lan Traynor and Tony Treleaven.
Tenaga-Cascades
The area chosen for the salvage project was the six-mile reach of the Gatineau from Tenaga to Cascades, or about the same area used by the Gatineau River Yacht Club for sailing. Another advantage to this location was that it was not more than a couple miles towing a heavily loaded raft in either direction to reach the drop-off point at the Prud’'Homme Road in Cantley. This was the only road that was available for logging trucks to get close enough to the river to load up the logs.
In June and July it was relatively easy to load the logs by hand, although many were quite heavy after being under water for the best part of a century. The crew became accustomed to lugging them up the bank and piling them in cords. Later on, two steel sleds were built and the logs were piled onto them as they sat on the raft. When they were full, the tug would push the raft to the shore, hook on a cable and haul the sled up the ever-increasing length of piled logs to be manhandled onto another pile. When empty, the sled was then hauled back to the raft and the quest for logs was underway again.
This process was perhaps the most tedious part of the work. Without the crane and dragline it was necessary to position the rafts in shallow water and spear the logs with pike poles, then haul them to the surface. Other crew cut the logs to size with chain saws. The work was rotated on a daily basis to prevent boredom and to allow for the use of different muscles.
Early in the project a couple of the crew felt it would be easier to gather the logs by diving for them. This was tried but proved useless as it became impossible to see well enough to work the minute the silt-covered river-bottom was disturbed. On occasion, though, it was necessary to send a diver down to retrieve a dropped tool or un-snag a line on the tug's propeller.
The project finally closed down in November when ice on logs made it dangerous to work, to say nothing of the cold. By then, most days were pretty abbreviated and the propane heater in the crew cabin was useful for thawing out both crew and ice-encrusted clothing.
Community spirit
While working on the river and benefiting from public funds, it occurred to me that there were a few community projects that could benefit from the combined expertise of the Clean Bottom Crew and our equipment.
The first of these projects was to test the quality of the water near the municipal beach beside the Gatineau River Yacht Club. The club was planning to offer a swimming program for the first time, and did not have the resources to do the testing. As it happened, the coliform count was far beyond the allowable limit for recreational water, and the mayor of Chelsea, the late Doug Minnes, closed the public beach until the water tested safe.
The pollution was found to originate behind an old log boom that was used as a shortcut from the CPR tracks to the public beach. It prevented the free circulation of water in the bay. Once the boom was removed and the tug boat spent a morning going in circles around the bay to flush it out, the bay was once again safe for swimming, as the next water tests proved.
As another community service, the crew, with the use of the tug boat, helped the Yacht Club remove a number of large dead trees from the island, saving the club some money and headaches. To accomplish this, Captain Dubois merely back-tied the tug to the shore, and using its cable and powerful diesel engine, literally ripped the giant dead pines out by the roots.
Because I had some experience in public relations it was not difficult to obtain a lot of coverage in the press, on television and radio. After all, it was a unique project for its time: the first systematic scheme to clean up the Gatineau River and at the same time create employment during a recession.
In fact, the Canada Works Program said that Operation Clean Bottom was rated the program that obtained the most publicity for the government.