Environmental & Geotechnical Drilling | Kodiak Drilling of Toronto Ontario Canada
Environmental & Geotechnical Drilling | Kodiak Drilling of Toronto Ontario Canada
The annual dinner, which is always good food and a good technical talk is fast approaching. It is always great to see so many of our geotechnical clients at this dinner. There are usually hundreds of people at this event. More information can be found by clicking Yummy Dinner. Once again this year, they are having a settlement prediction contest.
Mark the date – June 18, 2014 is the date for this Canadian Brownfields Network Event. Information can be found by clicking here.
Again this year, we have Jays Season Tickets. Let us know which date you want to go to the game. Go with us, go on your own, use them for your golf tournament, give the tickets to someone else – just give us your preferred date. Same seats as last year – directly behind the plate, in the 4th row of the upper deck. Hopefully a few more wins are in store for this season.
In the fall of 2013, after 19 years at the same location, Kodiak Drilling moved to a new location. Still in Oakville, we have moved to the east end; still with excellent highway access. Our new facility is more than twice the size of our old location, which makes it much better to handle our ever expanding needs for equipment and maintenance facilities. Although our clients do not normally see our facilities, the improvements to our behind the scenes infrastructure has improved the quality of our day to day operations and the work environment for employees. Our new address is 1101 North Service Road East, Oakville, L6H 1A6. All other contact information (phone/email/web) remains the same. Drop by for a tour when you are in the neighbourhood.
Dora Carambelas, Tina Kirkimtzis, Robert Fairley, Irene Miyama, Adele Brown, Elizabeth Roy, and Lillian Guglietti; those are the names of the seven people who lost their lives 10 years ago today as a result of utility locate issues. Today marks the anniversary of the Bloor Street Explosion. In summary, a problem related to obtaining appropriate locates was the cause of a tremendous explosion at a strip plaza on Bloor Street in the Six Points area of Etobicoke on April 24, 2003. The incident caused the complete destruction of the plaza and the loss of life for seven people in the plaza. As a result of the incident, investigations and court proceedings led to the eventual conviction of the excavation company, the utility locator, and Enbridge with penalties of $1.4 million in total. There are a number of articles in our blog related to this incident and more information in the Locate Resources section of our website.
Interestingly, one of the guilty pleas was for “failing to adequately supervise an employee in the implementation of the locate process”. This plea should be of interest to environmental and geotechnical consulting firms. It could have implications for firms ensuring their employees are properly trained with respect to utility locates when they are managing site investigations with drillers.
Five years after the explosion, a memorial garden and plaque were unveiled at the residential/commercial building that was constructed to replace the destroyed plaza.
Over the last 10 years since the explosion that levelled the plaza and killed seven people, there has been increased awareness of utility locate issues, modification to the Occupational Health and Safety Act to improve wording in the construction regulation, and just last year an entirely new Act (Ontario Underground Infrastructure Notification System Act), and we still have people requesting us to drill when they do not have complete locates.
Date: April 24, 2013
