President’s Notebook
MASTER APEGA
A Past to Celebrate, A Future to Plan BY JANE TINK, P.ENG., FEC, FGC (HON.) APEGA President
This year, many of us celebrated the 150th anniversary of Canada’s Confederation. I hope each of you had an opportunity to mark this significant milestone in Canada’s history with your family, friends, and neighbours. In just over two years, APEGA Members will have another special anniversary to celebrate — APEGA’s centennial is in 2020. With both these milestones in mind, I began to think about how far we have come. I thought about the changes that have occurred in our country, our province, our professions, and our Association, and about the role our Members and their innovations have played. I spent time researching the history of our Association and the impact of our professions. On the website of the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC) , I discovered a number of history articles, including one, titled Engineering Designations of National Historic Significance , that lists Canada’s historic sites by province. Among the Alberta sites mentioned are Yellowhead Pass in Jasper National Park, the aqueducts in Brooks, and the Galt irrigation canals in Magrath. Turner Valley’s gas field and plant are on the list, and so are the Leduc oilfield and the Waterton Lakes National Park oil well, which is the first oil well in Alberta and, for that matter, in Western Canada. Some of these sites are simply marked with plaques, but others, such as the Turner Valley Gas Plant, are open to visitors. Reading the list, originally compiled by Parks Canada, I found it easy to appreciate how important both the agriculture industry and the oil and gas industry are to our provincial economy and the APEGA professions. As we look forward to our centennial and our next 100 years, we should not forget the foundation that was laid for us. These landmarks were created without the use of calculators, computers, the
Internet, or cell phones. The calculations were done using slide rules, and the designs utilized both training and experience. Other papers on the EIC site look at historic Canadian inventions. When you read about them and think about the number of innovations in the last decade alone, you can appreciate how rapidly we are developing and improving our scientific knowledge, technology, and applications. A COAL MINING STORY In my trip to the past, I read an interesting book called Bankhead: The Twenty Year Town . Written by Ben Gadd, it tells the story of a coal mining town within Banff National Park at the base of Cascade Mountain. CPR geologists started evaluating the coal seam there in 1902, but this seam was different: it went upwards. The author described this as a “geologist’s joy” but a “mining engineer’s nightmare.” The book outlines some of the innovations that allowed the men to get the coal to market. One of these was mixing fines with imported pitch and pouring the liquid into rotating drums to create little lumps of coal, or briquettes. Others related to blasting upwards while keeping miners safe from the coal raining down. The Bankhead mining town sprung up almost instantly in 1904 and thrived for 20 years, a mix of people of different nationalities living together in a town with municipal water, sewer, and even electricity. However, as with most coal mines of the day, miners suffered from black lung from breathing in coal dust and went on strike. Around the same time, the federal government shut down mining and prospecting in our national parks, stating that a coal glut made them unnecessary. The mine and town were
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