1910 CPR Rogers Pass Avalanche - Approx. 2359hr, Friday, 4 March 1910
The text referred to the technique of first shovelling off snow in excess of the ten-vertical-feet maximum capacity of the rotary snow plow. So in this particular case, when they had shovelled down to 10 feet of snow, did the rotary start bulling its way into that mess of snow and timbers?
... In 'post-crafting' I find I often stumble back and forth between technical writing ... and an effort to do 'historical writing' - which is intended to convey 'the human experience of railroading' and/or an imagination of what a period of history was like.
In that particular section, I was attempting to outline the techniques used to work around the capacity limits of the rotary snow plow technology - organized manual shovelling. This was just general technical writing without trying to consider all the variables confronting those trying to clear the 1910 avalanche destruction.
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I was never interested in this disaster before I discovered contemporary newspaper articles about the experiences of the workers ... and in particular those coming from places in Asia and South Asia.
... Years ago, I had some exceptional training as I prepared to work with newcomers to Canada as a volunteer, and I've since understood typical Canadian historical stories of 'foreign labourers' in that context. Imagining a reverse situation: Parachuting ourselves into typical life and work in Japan, China, or India in 1910 would have been incredibly difficult without any preparation - such as basic language classes. Except for the promises made to them by agents and jobbers, these newcomers of 1910 probably had little realistic, factual information about the 'adventures' they would have in western Canada.
... In 1910, the CPR just needed bodies pushing shovels during the winter season. There was no desire on the part of Shaughnessy's road to get 'touchy-feely' with language classes and conversation groups and 'integration' activities (to develop connections and a degree of comfort with Canadian society), or efforts to share cultural experiences (e.g. your food/my food) back and forth, canoeing, snowshoeing etc.
... One of the articles of 1910 sort of jokes about telegraphers having difficulty with the [Asian] "code" as workers tried to send telegrams indicating they were alive and OK to family members on the coast of British Columbia.
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Getting back to our avalanche disaster story, and the use of the rotary snow plow to clear the line ...
If you are NOT visiting this website to risk experiencing vicarious trauma, skip the rest of this paragraph. In the area where the large 1910 avalanche buried the workers trying to clear a previous slide ... the ten feet of snow above the rail would contain ... large timbers, pieces of trees, large rocks, snow, ice, chunks of steel, humans killed by suffocation, humans who had died from traumatic injury, body parts.
Immediately after this disaster, there would have been plenty of frantic but fruitless hand-digging for survivors when the first small groups of rescuers arrived. There is no record to indicate how long it took the second rotary to finally attend the scene, but one newspaper story says it was forced back by the quantity of timber in the slide.
One of the Canadian newspaper accounts said that the second slide buried a quarter mile area to a depth of 50 feet. If they only moved the snow once ... to clear a 10-foot-wide strip of roadbed ... the total amount moved by rotary and by hand would be about 0.6 million cubic feet or 17,000 cubic metres of snow.
The work would have been incredibly difficult and the disaster would have been traumatic for many ... as the last paragraph of the final newspaper story suggests.
The CPR swore up and down to the newspapers that the final death toll was 62 and that all workers were accounted for. Certainly there would be an accurate accounting of the 'regular' CPR employees with families in the area. Some of the American accounts said that many victims were swept away from the main line and might not be found until spring.
