Free The Snow Tiger / Night of Error by Bagley Desmond Page B

the engineer, who saw the true significance of the cup crystals. ‘Could you draw a picture of one of those, Mike?’
    ‘Sure.’ McGill took a pencil from his pocket and made a drawing. ‘As I said, it’s conical in shape – like this – and it has this hollow in the blunt end. That’s why it’s called a cup crystal.’
    ‘I’m not worried about the hollow.’ Cameron stared at the drawing. ‘What you’ve sketched here is a pretty good picture of a tapered roller bearing. You say these are likely to form under that layer of hard hoar frost?’
    ‘Correct.’
    ‘That’s not good,’ said Cameron. ‘That’s not good at all. If you get a lot of weight on top pushing downwards vertically by gravity then there’ll be a resultant force sideways on the slope. The whole hillside could come down on ready-made bearings.’
    Cameron passed the drawing to Dobbs who looked at it with Quentin, the union man, peering over his shoulder. ‘Any of those cup things there now?’
    ‘There are indications of them forming in one of the samples I took. I’d say the process is well under way.’
    ‘Let’s have a look at your stress figures.’ Cameron grimaced as he began to go through the equations. ‘I’m used to working with stronger stuff than snow.’
    ‘The principle is the same,’ said McGill.
    Dobbs handed the drawing to Ballard. ‘Are you seriously telling us that there’ll be an avalanche which will fall on this mine?’
    ‘Not exactly,’ said McGill carefully. ‘What I’m saying, at this moment, is that there is a potential hazard that must be watched. I don’t think there is a present danger – it’s not going to come down in the next hour or even today. A lot depends on future events.’
    ‘Such as?’ asked Ballard.
    ‘The way the temperature goes. Future snow precipitation. An appreciable rise in wind speed wouldn’t help much, either.’
    ‘And the forecast is for more snow,’ said Ballard.
    McGill said, ‘When you have a potential hazard like this you have to take precautions. Protecting the mine portal, for instance. There’s a steel construction called Wonder Arch which comes in useful. It was developed at Camp Century in Greenland specifically for this type of application. It’s used a lot in the Antarctic.’
    ‘Is it expensive?’ asked Dobbs. His voice was clouded with doubt.
    McGill shrugged. ‘It depends on how much money you put against lives on the balance sheet.’ He turned to Cameron. ‘Joe, remember me asking if you’d heard of Granduc in British Columbia?’
    Cameron looked up from the figures. ‘Yeah. I hadn’t.’
    ‘Granduc is remarkably like your mine here. They installed Wonder Arch – put in a covered way to the mine portal.’ He rubbed the side of his jaw. ‘It was like closing a stable door after the horse has gone; they put in the arch in 1966 after the avalanche of 1965 when twenty-six men died.’
    There was a silence broken after a while by Cameron. ‘You make your point very clearly.’
    Ballard said, ‘I’ll put it to the Board of Directors.’
    ‘That’s not all,’ said McGill. ‘You got to look at the situation in the long term. That slope is dangerous mostly because it’s been stripped of timber. It will have to be stabilized again,and that means building snow rakes. Good snow rakes cost sixty dollars a foot run – I doubt if you’d get away with under a million dollars.’
    The sound of Dobbs’s suddenly indrawn breath was harsh.
    ‘Then there’s the snow deflection walls at the bottom,’ went on McGill inexorably. ‘That’s more – maybe even half a million. It’s going to cost a packet.’
    ‘The Board won’t stand for it,’ said Dobbs. He stared at Ballard. ‘You know we’re just paying our way now. They’re not going to put in all that extra capital for no increase in production. It just isn’t on.’
    Quentin stirred. ‘Would you want to close down the mine?’
    ‘It’s a possibility,’ said Ballard. ‘But it’s