BRADA, Sask. – When Don Stevenson works, the earth moves.
His company, Stevenson’s Dirt Moving, has been working since last fall to clear the construction site and build the roads and pads for the concrete towers that make up Saskattchewan Wheat Pool’s grain elevator being built near North Battleford, Sask. Stevenson’s firm is now building the rail bed for trains that will take grain from the elevator.
The heavy work is done by huge scrapers, payloaders, graders and dump trucks. Tens of millions of pounds of soil and gravel must be moved.
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But when it’s all done, there’s not a lot to see.
“We’ll work somewhere for two months, but if you drove by you’d think we hadn’t done anything,” said Stevenson during a day when he was leveling the gravel runway leading into the elevator.
If Stevenson’s crew has done its job right, everything will be flat or gently sloped. It’s not work that is generally noticeable, but it’s everywhere.
The dirt movers are often the first people on the job site, when it is still a patch of green, unorganized prairie. They tear off the topsoil until they get down to solid clay.
Last fall at the Brada site, more than a metre of rocky soil had to be removed. The dirt movers cleared the general area, built roads to the site, and laid out a pad for the slipform that would soon sprout into the tower of the elevator’s main house.
Then most of the site went into hibernation for winter. Frozen ground can’t be tamped well and compaction specifications are rigid.
With spring came job revival. The dirt movers built the pad for the condo towers and pads for the crane and cement pumpers. The crane pad on the eastern side of the site is about three metres higher than the land around it because the terrain slopes sharply.
Some of the heaviest work is occurring right now. Machinery has scraped out a deep pit about half a kilometre from the two towers, and the path into it is deeply furrowed with the tire tracks of the TS-14 scrapers that continually dig it deeper.
They’ve found the “good dirt” they need here in the borrow pit. It’s solid clay, which is used to form bases for all the heavy structures. Many metres of earth will be needed to build the rail line that leads from the CN main line to the elevator.
The clay bed has to be level, but the land isn’t level. The crew has to fill in the depressions and then build the rail bed above the level of the surrounding land.
It takes a lot of clay. It also takes a lot of “sub-ballast,” the material that sits beneath the ties and rails.
A two-track rail line to an elevator uses about 7,500 yards of sub-ballast and many times more earth. The bed here will be able to hold four lines.
For the next two weeks the dirt movers will be building the clay bed for the rail line. For two weeks after that, they will lay the sub-ballasts.
There’s an informal gender division among Stevenson’s crews. A number of his workers are couples, who travel from job to job together. The men do most of the dirt moving, while the women run the packers.
Most of the workers come from the area around Willow Bunch, a town south of Moose Jaw, where the company is based. Some are farmers, as is Stevenson.
His son operates a 2,100-acre farm near Viceroy. Stevenson got into the concrete elevator business a few years ago, when it began to boom. He had worked for a rural municipality road crew before starting his own company in 1990. He has been involved in the site work for several elevator projects, including the Cargill elevator in Moose Jaw, Sask.
Then he met up with Sask Pool’s Project Horizon elevator program, and has done little else for the past two years. His company mothballed its road-building work and focused on elevator site work.
“The last few years we’ve been chasing all over,” said Stevenson, who is working on elevators in Brada, Rosetown and Maple Creek, “but these are the last of them.”
Sask Pool’s new elevator system is almost completed. After these, Stevenson’s company may go back to building small patches of road in RMs.
“These are worth moving for,” he said as the sun set on another long day of hauling dirt and leveling gravel.
