Half a century ago, 'Andy the Cat' helped build Sudbury's Superstack
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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.'
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