Construction on Sudbury seniors' home expansion begins
A Sudbury seniors' home, Finlandia Village, is undergoing its seventh expansion and should be ready by next summer.
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CBC
4 hours ago
- CBC
Flin Flon wildfire evacuees gather at Assiniboine park for barbecue
Social Sharing As thousands of evacuees remain out of their homes due to wildfires, some from Flin Flon are looking to stay connected to their community in Winnipeg. Wildfire evacuees from Flin Flon got together at Assiniboine Park on Tuesday evening for a Barbeque gathering. More than 50 people attended, including families, adults, kids and seniors. Organizer Luis Nikkel says they planned to feed almost 1,000 to 1,500 people, not only from Flin Flon but also from other affected communities. He says get-togethers like this are therapeutic for the evacuees. "It's basically to just get the community together so that they can socialize and have a bite to eat and have fun," said Nikkel. He says he reached out to a lot of his friends who sponsored this event and helped spread the word through social media. Nikkel, a development miner by profession, is one of the evacuees from Snow Lake. He left a week ago. "It felt a little chaotic, because I was woken up at 9:00 in the morning and I just had three hours to leave … there was a lot of thick smoke in Snow Lake due to the wildfires," he said. Isabel Plamondon said events like this help her reconnect with her community and be in a familiar environment. "It's a little surreal, because I know everybody is not doing what they are expecting to be doing. It is really nice to connect with people that I hadn't seen, or hadn't been able to reach out to earlier when things were going on," Plamondon said. Another evacuee, Dorothy Dorion, says she is not happy with the arrangements in Winnipeg for the evacuees, as she is living in one hotel room with seven other people. "It's a lot to handle and it's very chaotic," she said. "There's a lot going on all the time and you got to stay on top of things and the financial help is not there now. Everyone is struggling with the funding and food and clothes," said Dorion. Some evacuees, like Bob Lyons, were keeping a close eye on things back home. He's been monitoring his home through his security camera. "These events really do take some of the tension," he said. "People like ourselves, we know we have a house only because we have monitoring systems. We have a cottage, we don't know. And there's a lot of people that actually know that they've lost all of their possessions, perhaps." Lyons says people from Flin Flon are sticking together through events like the gathering in Assoiniboine Park. "I think it helps with the sense of community, we are hoping that everybody can manage somehow to rebuild ... so that we don't lose a lot of our friends and community members as a result of this disaster. And I am hoping it will, in many ways, make your community stronger as well." Cool weather, rain help fire fight Wildfires in Manitoba have pushed about 21,000 people out of their homes, prompting provincial officials to ask travellers to stay away to free up hotel space. The largest fire, near Flin Flon and Sherridon, is approximately 307,781 hectares and remains out of control. According to Environment Canada, Flin Flon got 2 mm of rain over the weekend, while other parts of Manitoba got upwards of 20 mm. Flin Flon Mayor George Fontaine says the cooler weather and rain helped their firefighting efforts and so far the city has not lost any structures. "Today is more of a monitoring day than a fighting day. Things have calmed down a little bit. People are still doing their firefighting. Everybody's organized," Fontaine said. Fontaine says fire crews know there will be flare ups in the days ahead and are preparing. "They are ready to jump when the action is needed," he said. If the situation remains stable, they may start talking about return plans sometime next week, Fontaine said.
CTV News
6 hours ago
- CTV News
Nearly 90k lbs of food collected for London Food Bank
Organizers with the London Cares Curb Hunger campaign say they brought in nearly 90,000 pounds of food. The London Food Bank's campaign wrapped up over the weekend at several local grocery stores. Organizers say it's about stockpiling for the food bank now before donations slow down during the summer months.
National Post
12 hours ago
- National Post
Half a century ago, 'Andy the Cat' helped build Sudbury's Superstack
Article content As workers begin to chip away at the Superstack, slowly dismantling it from the top down, a Val Caron retiree is thinking back on the time he spent climbing with it into the clouds as a member of the original construction crew. Raising the mega chimney went remarkably fast, given the scope of the task at hand. The metre-thick base started to take shape in the spring of 1970 and, by the end of that summer, the concrete shell — which split the horizon like a giant dinner candle — was basically complete. (It would also need a steel liner, however, and would not go into operation until 1972.) 'You could go one foot an hour pouring concrete, and even faster as it tapered off,' said Andre Gallant. 'I was working 12-14 hours a day, but it was a good experience. How many times do you get to go up that high?' The stack would ultimately reach 1,250 feet, exceeding the level of the observation deck on the CN Tower. Gallant, in his early 30s at the time, would be among the group gathered at its dizzying peak to celebrate the occasion. 'I was there when they poured the last bucket of concrete,' he said. 'We put up a Canada flag at the top when we were done.' Some guys, including Gallant, also scrawled a few words on the structure. 'I took a paint crayon and printed out the names of my wife and three kids on that white ring you see at the top,' he said. A welder by trade and member of the Ironworkers local in Sudbury, Gallant's main job was to manage the placement of the steel rods required to reinforce the concrete. More than 1,000 tons of this rebar — with rods ranging in size from a half-inch to nearly an inch-and-a-half — went into the structure, according to an Inco Triangle article from the time. 'The people down below would send up a package of rods to the scaffold where I was standing on the chimney,' said Gallant. 'I would undo the hook from the crane, lay it down, and then two or three other guys would spread the rod all around the stack.' He also welded angle-iron fixtures for aircraft warning lights and performed various maintenance tasks, including greasing the wheels for the hoist. Workers travelled up and down in a small cage — it could fit four men, squeezed together — that ran inside the chimney, while concrete was hauled up in buckets and delivered to the forms by rubber-tired buggies. All this happened atop a 200-ton construction platform, elevated by a system of hydraulic jacks that supported an erection tower. Safety nets were strung below, inside the stack, but workers were often performing tasks near the edge and fall-prevention gear seems to have been optional, or at least not strictly enforced. 'They promoted (that) you have a harness with you all the time, but most of the guys didn't bother with them,' said Gallant. He was among that cavalier camp. Photos taken at the time show him navigating narrow walkways at great heights, or casually clinging to a part of the spidery superstructure, with little more than a hard hat and work boots for protection. Old habits die hard, apparently. 'A couple of years ago, I found him on top of a ladder with a shop vac in one hand, vacuuming leaves out of the eavestrough,' said daughter Rhonda. 'I couldn't handle it and had to walk away.' Gallant, now 87, admits he wasn't quite so confident in his first year as an ironworker. 'In those days, if you put a building up, you had to climb a column (a vertical I-beam or H-beam) by hand, like a monkey,' he said. 'If you asked a foreman for a ladder, they would say 'go home.'' Over time, however, he got quite adept at scaling various structures and any acrophobia he might have had to begin with was gone. A few years before he joined the crew on the Superstack, he had even acquired the nickname The Cat for his fearlessness and agility. 'I was going up to the top of an A-frame at Stobie (Mine) and the guy down below said, 'Hey Andy, you look like a cat up there,' ' he said. 'It stuck and I was Andy the Cat after that.' When the stack was nearly complete, a tornado swept through Sudbury, killing six people in the city and putting the lives of many workers on the Inco edifice at risk. Rhonda was a child at the time and recalls her mom looking anxiously out the window of their home, in the direction of Copper Cliff, as the storm was brewing. Gallant was on the job that day, but as fate would have it ended up experiencing the blow from a lower level than he would have ordinarily. 'I went up in the morning and I could tell we were going to have a storm,' he recalled. 'But when I got to the top, I realized I had forgotten my respirator (which was important on days when fumes were coming from an existing Inco chimney). I said I'm going to choke today, so I went back down on the elevator, and when I got about 15 feet from the ground, the power kicked out.' He didn't want to stay trapped in the cage, especially if some debris started flying down as a result of the tempest, so he opened the door and jumped down to a pile of gravel. 'I lay on my side, curled up, in case I was going to get hit by 2x4s and plywood.' Six workers were on the construction platform at the time, all of whom luckily survived. Many crew members weren't eager to keep working after that, however, said Gallant, so he found his hours increased in the aftermath of the scare. Quite a few people packed it in over the course of the project, he said, either because they found the shifts too demanding or the heights too scary, but he was determined to see it out. 'I had too much pride,' he said. 'I said if I quit now, it would be chickening out. After I was there, I wanted to finish it.' He also enjoyed the views from such a lofty vantage point. During the daytime, you could see clear to Silver Peak in Killarney. At night — the concrete work went 24 hours a day, Monday to Friday — there was a spectacle of lights from communities spread over a huge distance, not to mention the stars above. Some days, you couldn't see anything, as mist or smoke enwrapped the stack, and you would gag on sulphur if your mask wasn't handy. But that could be survived through a sense of purpose, decent pay, and a few moments of levity. One day, about a week before the stack was complete, Gallant — an avid golfer to this day — smuggled a five-iron up to the top, hidden inside a pant leg. He had also pocketed a ping-pong ball. The tee-off occurred on a couple of planks of wood, balanced more than 1,000 feet in the air. Gallant isn't sure where his shot landed but he's pretty sure the hollow plastic orb didn't injure anyone. His happiest memory of the job? 'That moment when it was done,' he said. 'Being able to say, I did it.' He and the other workers celebrated at the top but also when they got down to terra firma. Some of the Americans on the project had brought in bottles of bourbon and they all clinked glasses in a construction trailer. 'I don't like bourbon, but I took a shot anyway,' said Gallant. 'It would have been better if it was Wiser's (Canadian whisky).' In subsequent years, he could always look up at the stack, from pretty much any place in Sudbury he happened to be, and feel some pride and nostalgia about the time he spent making it happen. But he's not actually that upset about the fact that it is coming down. 'It was a great summer for me,' he said. 'Now it's just more work for the younger guys coming up.'
