Tag Archives: ice road truckers

Bulker goes off the road

The Dalton claims another truck!

Jack calls this kind of trailer a bulker.  It carries dry powders like concrete, sand, or ammonium nitrate.  This one probably carried concrete or sand.  He says they use air to transfer the product from one place to another.  Unloading a bulker is called “blowing it off” to the people who do it.  In Prudhoe they store the product in silos.

Don’t forget you can increase the resolution on a YouTube video by clicking on the settings symbol in the lower right hand corner and choosing a higher number than what YouTube picked for you.

 

Driver has a bad day

Another truck goes off the road!  This one is about 20 miles from Prudhoe.

Happy Sunday everyone!  We’re having a beautiful sunny day after some snow and a wind storm that cut out our electricity for a couple of hours last night.

 

Upside Down Truck

Here’s a short video Jack took the other day at about mile 86 of the Dalton.  The truck got too close to the edge when it met another truck and went off the side and rolled over.  A tree trunk punctured the tanker and according to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation about 3,000 gallons of ultra low sulfur diesel spilled onto the ground.  Here is a link to the local newspaper’s article about it.

Jack carries approximately 9,200 gallons in the tanker he uses.  Other tankers are larger or smaller.  All or most tankers have different compartments though so when one has a spill most likely it’s only that compartment that empties.  Having different compartments enables truckers to carry different types of liquids and/or put weight at different places in the load.

(YouTube has a bad habit of giving you the lowest resolution so if you want to see more detail try clicking one of the HD choices under settings in the lower right hand corner of the video screen.)

 

Pushing a crane

It’s quite common for a really heavy load to have one or more push trucks behind it to push when going up inclines.  Push trucks are commonly used on the Dalton Highway as well as the Parks and Richardson when the loads are outrageously heavy, otherwise it would take a very long time and so much fuel for the truck with the load to get up a mountain, and it would also impede traffic for long periods of time.  The push trucks just follow the load when not going up hills.

Taken 11 years ago, these photos really show how close Jack’s push truck gets to the load he’s pushing (a crane).  You can see the pad that the push bar pushes against, how the trucks make contact.

Curved directional pipe for crude oil

Crude oil pipe on truckI snapped these on Friday when this truck was fueling up to head north.Crude oil pipe on truck

Jack says they are used for crude oil and that they lay on their sides, not upright like on the truck. You can see the actual metal portion of the pipe that is colored green with anti-corrosion paint.  The black is thinner metal and in between the two is foam insulation.

This load is obviously going to Deadhorse or Prudhoe Bay.  (FYI:  Deadhorse refers to the “town” where companies have their operations, and Prudhoe Bay refers to the actual oil fields and is a much larger area.)

Click on the photos for larger images.

 

Snow-filled engine compartment

Jack snapped these shots after going through numerous snow drifts before he got into Prudhoe Bay.  The engine is operating fine and he didn’t need to do anything, but it’s interesting to see how the snow gets into all the available spaces.  The keypad looking thing is actually the air intake for the cab and the vent above it is the intake for the motor.  Even though the engine is 200 degrees plus it’s still not enough to melt the snow at these temperatures, about 20 or 30 below.

The engine after going through snow drifts

Snow filled engine

Mod Lift at Alpine

Hard to believe this was 10 years ago, Jack says.  This is a mod lift at the Alpine oil fields (mod is short for modular), back when he was doing heavy haul.  Since it’s been so many years all he had to say about it was that he hauled this prefabricated unit to Alpine from Valdez and the workers there got busy lifting it off his truck.  It took all day actually.  That was one part of heavy haul he doesn’t miss.

 

Donjek River Bridge, follow up

A few months after Jack helped haul bridge beams to the Donjek River Bridge in Canada, he went back to haul the beams from the staging area off the road onto the ice where they were constructing the bridge. (Best viewed if you click on the first one and scroll to the right.)  See captions for more info.

Two cranes are needed to pick up bridge beams, one on each end, since they will break if they are picked up from the middle. In the construction process they are pre-stressed to take weight from the top and won’t hold up if lifted from the middle.
The old bridge is on the left and the cranes are moving down onto the river.
Jack is down on the frozen river here with the new bridge on the left and what looks to him like concrete joints on the right.
The orange tarp is covering the concrete and keeping the warmth in from heaters so that it will cure.
The 2 cranes are on their way up to the staging area where they will pick up the beams and place them onto the trailers for the trucks to bring them down to the river where the cranes will then pick them back up and place them on the bridge in their correct positions.
They are loaded and following the cranes back down to the river.

Hauling Pipe Rack Units to Prudhoe

A few years ago Jack and some other truckers took these pipe rack units from Fairbanks to Alpine, an area of Prudhoe Bay owned by Conoco-Phillips.  You’ll see the units being loaded, then Jack driving behind other units. You can see the pipes in the middle of the structure as well as the valve controls on the top.  These units are lined up next to each other and connected as part of the process of extracting oil and getting it into the pipeline to go south.  In one of the ice road photos you can see a pipeline on the right.

They drive through tundra, over mountains, and finally on the ice roads of Prudhoe Bay.  The last couple of photos, the ones where the road doesn’t look particularly icy, they are passing over a river.  If you are also rather astute (and here I am giving you a clue) you can also see Jack’s reflection in the mirror, as well as a reflection of the small fan that he had mounted on the dash that could turn toward the windshield to defrost it or toward him on hot days.

(The best way to view the photos is to click on the first one and then click on the right arrow.)

Driving the Dalton

Jack finally took a video of driving down the road.  It seems like a silly thing to do but people have requested more videos and this one shows what most of his job is like, on the good days.  🙂

(If these appear blurry change your resolution settings on the bottom right side of the player.)

 

Happy New Year!!