Dr Stig Bernander, someone I have the utmost respect for as a
technical expert and as a very decent and moral man, continues to try to save us
from ourselves at the North Spur.
His most recent contribution - Summing Up of North Spur Stability Issues - gets right down into the weeds. He demonstrates that based on the little data that Nalcor has, something as basic as
filling the reservoir may well trigger a failure of the North Spur.
Imagine that – a well motivated older man, who has earned the
right to have nothing more on his mind than trying to pick out the perfect gift
for his grandchild, is torn up over what he sees as a pending catastrophe at the
North Spur and Stan Marshall is up in Labrador singing “All is Well” to the
local citizenry who are not in a position to say “BS” and prove it.
All because Nalcor has not done its homework and hides behind
the lack of data and proper analysis.
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| Dr. Stig Bernander |
You are looking north from the south side of the Churchill
River.
The Upper and Lower Muskrat Falls (yes there are two) are
shown at the bottom. The white line above the yellow dashed line is the Trans
Labrador Highway at about 90 meters above sea level.
All (I repeat all)
the many square kilometers within the dashed yellow line are most certainly underlain
by various amounts of sensitive glaco-marine clay including Quick Clay that can
suddenly turn to watery mud.
The Google Earth image
was taken in June 2015 and the amount of land disturbance is clear (with more
since).
The proper and only sure-fire way of getting data is to drill
boreholes and retrieve cores of the various underground strata. No boreholes no
core – no core no reliable data – no data no reliable studies.
I have divided the whole area into three different risk or
“uncertainly” zones based solely on the presence or absence of soil data.
Zone One is the “best” grading up to Three which is the worst
– none of them are good.
Zone 1 – area of limited boreholes giving limited data coverage especially as the underground conditions in this area are known to vary quickly from place to place where a borehole will encounter a say 2 meter sand at a certain depth but one nearby will see nothing but clay at that depth.
Zone 2 – area of almost no boreholes
Zone 3 – area of no boreholes at all – not a single one – Nada
.
The whole very large Zone
3 area is a sloping upward time bomb of sensitive marine clay ready to let go
at any moment for innumerable potential reasons – including a failure of the
North Spur itself in Zone One in the case outlined by Dr Bernander in his
latest report - the specific trigger will be predictably labelled as “unpredictable”
in the post mortem on any disaster -- when all and sundry are running to cover
their asses.
Speaking of which reminds me of an article I read in
Psychology Today a year or so ago on how the residents of Oso Washington State
learned to live with the risk of death by landslide.
And lest I be misunderstood, I am not suggesting that the
residents downstream of Muskrat are like the homeowners of Oso. No, the poor
people of HV-GB and Mud Lake are having risk forced on them.
No, it’s all those who are “in on” Muskrat that have to have
build up their – “No problem at the North Spur” defense mechanisms.
I mean, seriously, how can all those top Nalcor people sleep
at night with the North Spur hanging over their heads? What am I missing?
Here’s the link:
Oh!
Did I hear you ask “What about the insurance?”
Nice (if amoral) try but I have it from the highest authority
that there is a $23 million cap on Nalcor’s loss coverage at Muskrat Falls.