Cape Breton's Magazine

feet high. That's not a big dam, but to make a 120 foot dam we must use all the pre? caution and all the care and all the technique that you will use making a 500 foot dam. You've got an underground powerhouse: it's a piddling little thing, a small little thing • but it's an underground powerhouse, so we have to mine it out. Here you have everything that a big project has. (Still, this project is probably the greatest change in the Highlands since the Ice Age.) I don't like the word change. I would prefer you to say improvement. I don't think I have been on a project that we have done so little damage as this one. This is a beautiful one. When we were in India, you know, we were moving people by the tens of thousands' out of the reser? voir. The elephants were going crazy, stampeding. Because the wildlife were going crazy themselves the wildlife people could not control that and there was terrible poaching. It was like going to war when you walked at night in the reservoir. Guns going all over the place. People killing, killing, killing. Tigers and selling the skins, elephants and selling the tusks. The place was full with wild boars and they were being killed not for eating, just because they were going into the gardens. You see, the water was pushing them out. It was just senseless. You don't have that here. What we have here is a big rainfall and we're trapping that from being lost. And out of that we will create power. Fresh water going to the sea will have done some work for you. And that's what you want. It becomes a crime against society to say I don't want this because of a few fish. The fish will get used to it. They will. You will have a bigger reservoir, better fish, bigger fish. (But if they are spawning in the lakes they can't successfully spawn if the surface level keeps changing.) If you trap a couple thousand and squeeze the eggs out of them and put Ned Trask is the representative for the Nova Scotia Power Corporation at the project site. He gave us our first ride into the Highlands and an overview of the investiga? tive work to be done. Joseph Nonna. caiief Surveyor. SNC? is shown here with Clarence Maclnnes and Stewart MacDonald. locating the drill for the series of test holes to locate the Tailrace tunnel. Mr. Trask said the Mr. Nonna is lust about the key man at this point, mapping the precise locations of all future work. Under Mr. Nonna*' direction extensive cutting has been carried out on private and crown lands, in both spruce and hardwood forest • including in some cases the entire tops of hills for aerial marks'and wide straight openings for survey lings. Rock Poulin explained! "The mouth of the tunnel is at sea level. The Cabot Trail is about 100' elevatio So I must make a road to reach that place, an access road to bringTn Martin Rancourt: ??''''''- right there. _ , . _' _ ,' all my men, equipment, for the construction." Martin Rancourt: "Right now we are trying to locate the access of our Tailrace in such a way we won't disturb the ac' tual road there. We don't want to move the road: we don't want to excavate a channel fnd put a bridge on top of it. We think we have Just enough rock to start tunneling. ou'll be travelling on the same road and you'll see the channel • maybe a couple of / hundred feet there you'll see this excavation right down to the Tailrace--the Tail- race wonH be covered with earth ri'ht to the end (the sea). It is impossible. You could build a nice lovely bridge going across that channel if we have to build that channel longer. It's iust a matter of cost.**