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Coastal GasLink continues to securely advance the tunnel under the Morice River, by which CGL’s natural-gas pipeline will run.
CGL studies that the tunneling course of is anticipated to be accomplished this winter, which is able to mark the completion of all 10 main watercourse crossings on the pipeline route.
And the challenge is displaying up the fear-mongering nonsense being spouted by protester and media-star Molly Wickham.
She has declared: “The disturbance and the sediment alone from drilling beneath the river will destroy our skill to drink that water perpetually. The sediment alone might destroy the salmon spawning eggs. It might destroy the airflow underwater or underground water stream and oxygen that will get into the spawning grounds.”.
She provides no proof as to why a tunnel 11 metres under the riverbed would do any of this stuff, nothing from a fisheries scientist, an engineer, a geologist, a hydrologist, or a soil scientist or another professional; simply her personal activist assumptions.
She provides no recognition that the Morice River crossing is just one of many profitable “trenchless crossings” of water on the Coastal GasLink route. They embody using Direct Pipe Set up® beneath the Kitimat River (with a 270-metre tunnel) and horizontal directional drilling (HDD) beneath the Murray River in northeast BC in 2021 (with a drilled pipe-tunnel 1.3km lengthy.)
And so they have been carried out with no environmental destruction — and no blockades or vicious axe-attacks on crews and tools as has occurred to Coastal GasLink in Morice River territory.
(The Impartial Contractors and Companies Affiliation of BC has provided a reward of as much as $100,000 for information resulting in any arrest and cost within the Feb. 17 assault on Coastal GasLink staff and tools.)
Up to now, 9 of 10 main CGL watercourse crossings have been safely accomplished. Now comes the Morice River.
It’s certainly a salmon river. It helps chinook, pink, coho and sockeye salmon, and steelhead and trout.
“There are fish of 1 species or one other which might be in that waterway always of the yr,” says Michael Value, a fisheries biologist and researcher with Simon Fraser College.
However the superior “micro-tunneling” approach utilized by Coastal GasLink is a confirmed technique of utilizing a remote-controlled tunnel-boring machine, after which hydraulic jacks to push concrete casing segments by the tunnel deep beneath water our bodies. The pipeline is then safely pulled by the tunnel created by the concrete casing.
And on this case, the pipeline can be a full 11 metres beneath the riverbed.
As Coastal GasLink notes: “After finishing environmental and technical assessments equivalent to water stream, financial institution stability, wildlife, vegetation and the amount and high quality of fish habitats, it was decided {that a} trenchless micro-tunneling crossing could be the most secure technique for building to cross the Morice River.
“Trenchless crossings are confirmed to permit pipe to be put in beneath the water physique with out ever affecting the stream of the river or stream. At the moment there are millions of trenchless crossings all through BC, working safely beneath rivers and streams of all sizes.
“This gained’t be the primary time that micro-tunneling is used. In actual fact, it’s recurrently utilized in our communities for public works and infrastructure initiatives, equivalent to hydro traces, sewer methods and different utilities in BC, and we now have assist from native and Indigenous communities to make use of this technique on the Morice.”
The HDD approach has been safely used for greater than 30 years to put pipelines beneath highways, railroads, rivers and streams, populated city areas, and environmentally delicate areas. Like micro-tunneling, it has additionally been used to put in energy cables, water traces, sewer traces, and fibre-optic telecom cables.
Following geotechnical and geophysical research, feasibility research, and engineering design, the drilling for a trenchless challenge begins at a staging website on one facet of the river.
A small drilled tunnel is angled and directed to run nicely beneath the river mattress (11 full metres within the case of the Morice), then angles upward to a staging website on the opposite facet of the river. At no level does the tunnel affect the riverbed or the water.
This primary tunnel is a small “pilot” tunnel, which is electronically checked to make sure it’s in the proper place and isn’t in any approach going to affect the river. The tunnel is then enlarged by “reaming”, in repeated passes, to the diameter wanted for the pipeline itself to undergo.
Or, in micro-tunneling, it’s reamed till it’s the proper measurement for the segments of concrete pipe to be pushed by by jacks to type a powerful tunnel by which the pipeline will run.
For Coastal GasLink, the pipe can be 48 inches (just below 122 cm) in diameter, the identical measurement as has been utilized in many trenchless crossings for main pipelines.
When the ultimate tunnel is examined and checked and prepared, a bit of the primary pipe is actually pulled by the tunnel from the place to begin to the ending level. The method is monitored all through.
The pipe then is examined, after which might be related to the primary pipeline. The stream of pure gasoline by it could actually start.
After the pipe is pulled by the its tunnel, the staging websites on either side of the river are restored.
And, all through, the method for Coastal GasLink is being monitored by First Nations individuals.
Listed here are two movies that present how the tunneling strategies work:
- From Coastal GasLink, Water crossings – What’s microtunneling?
- From Trans Mountain, this video reveals the approach and expertise used to direct its TMX enlargement oil pipeline beneath the Fraser River in Coquitlam: https://youtu.be/ArbzW29Qqmo
(The TMX challenge from Alberta to tidewater at Burnaby consists of some 40 trenchless crossings, of as much as 1,600 metres in size.)
(Posted right here 14 December 2022)
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