From highways and quarries to retired warships and special events, Canada’s blasters take on high-risk jobs that require technical expertise, planning and precision. Here, David Metcalfe (far right) and his team work a 2006 airshow in Halifax as part of the event’s pyrotechnique crew.Supplied
Dave Metcalfe was standing in the engine room of the decommissioned and stripped HMCS Annapolis, a massive naval destroyer floating in British Columbia’s Howe Sound, when it occurred to him: he was going to need more explosives. He’d already planned for 12 charges in parallel running the length of the ship, but had second thoughts during a site inspection with the marine architect.
“I got looking at it and going, ‘Man, that boiler room is so huge – we need to put more holes in it.’”
Mr. Metcalfe had never blown up a ship before. But after a lengthy eight-year process for the final go-ahead to scuttle the retired naval vessel and turn it into an artificial reef, he wanted to make sure it was done right. In the end, the 2015 sinking of the HMCS Annapolis took 16 perfectly placed charges. It disappeared beneath the surface in two minutes and one second.
“I was within one second,” Mr. Metcalfe, who’d guessed two minutes, says.
Sinking battleships isn’t his expertise. But explosives are. Mr. Metcalfe is president of DAMet, an Alberta-based supplier of specialty explosives, blast services and consulting, regulatory compliance, training and emergency response.
“I know all the different products. I know how they react,” he says.
Canada’s mining, construction and quarrying sectors consume millions of kilograms of explosives annually, underpinning everything from diamond mines in the Northwest Territories to highway construction in the Rockies – part of a North American market that accounts for roughly 40 per cent of global explosives demand. The country’s small, heavily licensed group of blasting contractors sit at the centre of it, handling work that ranges from the routine to the genuinely one-of-a-kind. Mr. Metcalfe has made a career of the latter.
Over the past 37 years, he’s blasted problematic beaver dams and decommissioned expired dynamite in the High Arctic, rigged explosives for airshows and blown up buildings for movies, including Inception and Bourne Legacy, which earned him a note from Steven Spielberg calling it one of the “best shots” he’d seen and a reminder that real explosions are better than computer-generated imagery.
“It just never ends … It’s fun,” he says. “The paperwork is tedious – that’s the part I hate.”
From one to the next
In the 1980s, Mr. Metcalfe was working in the oil patch as a wellsite geologist and as a salesperson for logging and perforating – using explosives to punch holes in oil wells and reservoirs. With a growing family and a need for more stability, he took a job as a salesperson for Explosives Limited, a company in Calgary.
At first, his focus was on sales for the perforation division. But his ability to solve complex blasting jobs earned him a reputation around the office. “If the receptionist got a phone call she didn’t know what to do with, she gave it to me,” Mr. Metcalfe says.
The company let him build a practice range south of Calgary. “I had an underground bunker [and] a test well that I’d set up for the perforating stuff,” he says. “That’s where I learned a lot, going out there and practicing.”
He says some of the things the company had him doing “just made people shake their heads,” but it was fun and the work was diverse. It wasn’t all explosions. He helped train customers, transported products to and from sites and guided clients through regulatory red tape. In 2013, he left to start his own company, DAMet.
Dave Metcalfe on the upper deck of the HMCS Annapolis in 2015 during loading operations.Supplied
“My first big job was 1,250 kilometres north of Inuvik,” he says. “We had just over 1,000 pounds of 41-year-old dynamite that needed to be destroyed.”
Word travelled and one job led to the next. Someone he taught how to blast in coal-fired boilers passed his name on to a mine looking for someone to develop their blasting plan, so he took the contract.
“I was putting about 1.3 million kilograms of explosives in the ground every year,” he says.
As his reputation continued to grow, he found new markets: pyrotechnics for airshows and film and television. Every job has taught him something new, says Mr. Metcalfe, who frequently collaborates with other blasting companies. Nothing’s more critical than paying attention to the details, he says. “We don’t stay alive if we don’t.”
Explosive growth
Rob Cyr, principal engineer at Explotech, an Ottawa-based blasting and explosive engineering firm, says it’s a strange field to operate in.
“Engineers tend to want to have rigid numbers,” says Mr. Cyr. “We don’t necessarily have that luxury. We have to use our experience, history and background to be able to come up with those solutions.”
That expertise is increasingly in demand.
The federal government’s Major Projects Office has identified 21 nation-building initiatives – mines, liquid natural gas facilities, trade corridors and Arctic infrastructure – representing more than $126-billion in projects, many of which start with blasting.
“Canada’s a very resource-based country,” Mr. Cyr says. Even still, the niche industry has kept up with demand.
“I’ve been doing this for decades, and we haven’t really had a situation whereby the current domestic players can’t meet the requirements,” he says. “[That’s] kept foreign players out of our market, which has been good because then you have continuity.”
Mr. Metcalfe says he’s struggled to find someone with an equally diverse background to take over his business when he’s ready to move on. “When I do retire, the blasting side of the company will disappear, I’ll just shut it down,” he says.
But he doesn’t see the discipline going anywhere.
“The world cannot live without its cars, without its toasters, without anything that requires a mineral or a metal,” he says. “And the only way you’re getting it out of the ground is blasted.”