When one starts a big-inch pipeline job, the safety orientation takes a good chunk of the day. Part of that orientation focuses on being a flagman.
Whenever a piece of equipment crosses a road, or is working adjacent to the road, you need two people out there with vests and stop signs, one in each direction. It doesn't matter if it's a dirt trail whose last traffic was guys on horses chasing buffalo, you need your flagmen. When crossing pavement, you also have a handful of labourers and oilers running rubber tires across the pavement for the tracked equipment to drive on. They also like to have a truck with blinking lights in each direction, too, as an added precaution.
In some cases, you don't shut down traffic, you just slow it down. This was the case in 1998 when I spent part of July working in the median of Highway 1 just west of the White City Esso. We were working on the very long, very difficult road bore which sent a 36 inch line across four lanes of the TransCanada Highway and the north side service road. It was something like 800 metres of boring.
The excavator I was assigned to was tasked with digging a sight hole right in the middle of the highway median. We needed to see where the boring machine was going so that it wasn't working its way towards one of the other pipelines in the same right of way. That would have spelled disaster.
We couldn't shut down the highway, but we also couldn't have wide loads driving past at highway speeds as the counterweight of the excavator was swinging into the line of traffic. Therefore the left lane in each direction was shut down, but traffic was still allowed past at reduced speed. This was the "orange zone," where drivers were supposed to drive only 60 km/h.
That was a joke.
A few times I was tasked with standing on the highway with my stop/slow sign, with the purpose of slowing down traffic. I soon realized I was like a big gobbling bird in a turkey shoot.
Cars don't slow down. Maybe half slowed. The rest only took their foot off the gas momentarily. Others just kept going. Indeed, since the usual clip is around 110 to 120 km/h on that stretch of highway, it was something akin to standing on the edge of a race track. There were several times where a car whizzed by so fast I was tempted to throw my sign into their windshield. This was the deterrence method my excavator operator preached, but I think he was bluffing.
I did this duty only sparingly, but it was enough to ratchet my stress level to the max. It was a fight or flight reflex, and any fight with a moving car or semi, you lose. Thankfully we soon moved on, and I spent the next three months standing in swamps. At least there were no sports cars barrelling down on me at 120 km/h.
The tragic incident of a flag person being mowed down at Midale this past summer was wrong on so many levels. It was wrong that the 18-year-old woman was killed. It was wrong she was killed on the first day of the job. (Young, green hands are typically the most likely to get hurt, or killed, on the job.) It was wrong that this young woman from New Brunswick came to Saskatchewan to work, and found death instead. It was wrong that her unborn child was killed with her.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. wrong.
On Halloween, I will yet again drive past the roadside memorial to her and her child while heading to Weyburn, the hardhat and high visibility vest on a white cross, and a smaller cross beside it.
In last week's speech from the throne, the provincial government announced it will be bringing in photo radar to enforce speed limits in the orange zone. I hate the very idea of photo radar, but after having been in the turkey shoot known as flagging, I can't see a better alternative, other than throwing signs at the drivers.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
