March brought winds ranging from 50–100 mph (80–160 km/h), and temperatures dropped into the minus range. Deke Orr arrived to relieve Bill, and Alf came up to help Jock with a 100-hour inspection. Deke started work on the triangulation survey for the tunnel, which involved setting up 20 stations at elevations ranging from 3,000 (915 metres) to 7,200 feet (2,195 metres), and he completed the operation in 90 flight hours spread over 28 days. During this time the helicopter usually positioned survey teams in the morning and hauled freight and passengers between camps for the rest of the day; in one period of 76 flight hours they carried 126 passengers and four tons (3.6 metric tonnes) of freight.
Spring brought improved weather, allowing construction on the tunnel to start in June. The diamond drilling crew began testing the rock for the location of the powerhouse with the helicopters—a second OAS helicopter, CF-GZJ, piloted by Fred Ellis had now arrived—positioning men and equipment on wooden platforms at 800-foot (243-metre) intervals. Survey work on the road to Horetzky Creek was completed in 100 hours, a significantly shorter time than it would have taken the surveyors on foot.
▲ An early campsite in Kildala Pass during power line construction. Photo courtesy of Gordon Askin
The main camp, situated at the confluence of two streams and the Kemano River, was made up of rows of wooden-walled tents erected the previous year. Although it was set among magnificent snow-capped mountains, the view from the camp was composed of the muddy river and the low cloud banks hugging the slopes. This newly created settlement was a highly structured society where supervisors and workmen did not mix socially—with the exception of one place: Joan McLeod, the wife of pilot Bill and the only woman in camp, was an excellent cook and their tent provided a rare opportunity for everyone to socialize. Joan, who enjoyed being surrounded by interesting people, had been educated in Toronto but had grown bored with city life and taken a job with QCA in Prince Rupert. It was there she met Bill. After they went south to Vancouver so that Bill could train as a helicopter pilot, she was unable to find a job and, when he was assigned to the Kemano project, she joined him. Some of their recollections of that time on the Alcan project are contained in Helicopters: The British Columbia Story by Peter Corley-Smith and David N. Parker.
In the fall of 1951 [Bill McLeod] . . . was flying construction crews into the newly installed helicopter pads on the sidehills of the mountains. Work had begun on the tunnel from the west end of Tahtsa Lake and on the main excavation for the power house. The two helicopters, one flown by Bill, the other by Fred Snell, were constantly in demand . . .
Joan McLeod . . . heard a commotion outside her tent. She stuck her head out of the fly to see what was going on and saw the engineering supervisor spring towards her along the lane between the rows of tents.
“Where’s Bill?” he demanded as he reached her. “Fred Snell’s killed himself.”
“Fred’s not flying today—Bill is.”
“Then where’s Fred? Bill’s killed himself.”
Not surprisingly, Joan abandoned her cake[-making] and followed the supervisor in his search for Fred Snell. Failing to find him, they returned to the river where the accident had occurred. Standing on the far shore, looking depressed but obviously not dead, was Joan’s husband. After shaking his head, he turned and disappeared into the trees again.
Later Bill explained to the authors of Helicopters: The British Columbia Story that it had been raining so hard that day neither he nor Fred had flown:
Horetzky Creek, which flowed down into the Kemano River, was rising at a rate of about a foot an hour and a log jam had developed. They were afraid the camp would be flooded. A bulldozer went out to try to clear the jam and it dropped into a hole. There were three people on the “cat.” One fell off and managed to swim ashore; the other two were up on the canopy, ankle-deep in the water. The water was still rising and two of the supervisors came to me and said those guys are going to drown; you’ll have to get them off. So I said okay, but here’s where I made my mistake: I didn’t go over and tell those guys on the “cat” what to do myself—I told the others to tell them while I ran for the helicopter.
The story in Helicopters: The British Columbia Story continues:
The instructions Bill wanted relayed to the men on the bulldozer canopy were to wait until [he] had put one skid on the canopy then, and only after [he] had given them the nod, they were to climb into the helicopter, one at a time. Bill had taken the doors off, and when he got within two or three feet of balancing one skid on the canopy, one of the catskinners made a wild leap and grabbed the front of the skid. The helicopter dropped violently and the nose of the skids actually went into the water. The only thing Bill could do now was to pull up hard on the collective and twist on as much throttle as he could. But the weight of the man on the front of the right skid pulled the helicopter down and to the right. There was . . . “nothing on the right but trees,” and he went barrelling right into them.
“When the noise finally died down,” Bill recalls, “I was still 30 feet [nine metres] above the ground in the trees, inverted, swaying gently up and down and listening to the pitter-patter of the rain drops. The fellow who was riding the skid was still there; he was half in the machine and half out; he was sort of pinned. Of course, the bubble was gone and I noticed the battery was smoking . . .”
The over-eager passenger was unconscious. Bill’s first attempts to get him out of the machine failed. So he climbed to the ground and found a branch to use as a pry . . . He managed to work the passenger free of the helicopter, ease him onto his shoulder and climb down to safety. The passenger recovered consciousness a few minutes later, but they were on the wrong side of the river, and Bill emerged from the trees to see what was going on . . .
▲ Bell 47B-3 CF-FJA crashed into the trees while trying to rescue men from a flash flood at Horetzky Creek, Kemano, in 1951. Pilot Bill McLeod was not seriously injured. Photo courtesy of Gordon Askin
There were some 400 people on the far bank and they were in the grip of a remarkable panic. One man was rushing into the water with a first-aid kit. He would rush in until the water reached his thighs, realized that he couldn’t go any further, retreat to the shore, only to rush back into the water again, sobbing with frustration. A little further along, someone had backed a bulldozer with a logging boom on it up to the water. A man was standing on the logging boom with a coil of rope, hurling it towards the far bank. It never reached more than halfway across the river, but doggedly he retrieved it, coiled it and tried again. An hour later he was still doing exactly the same thing. “It was unbelievable,” Bill recalls. “All that crowd of people—it was mass hysteria.”
Joan McLeod, surrounded by irrational panic, finally did the one thing that is effective for hysteria. She ran up to the engineering supervisor and booted him as hard as she could in the backside.
Shocked, he turned to look at her. “What did you do that for?” he demanded.
“To make you start thinking.”
It worked. The engineer sent for a mobile crane. They strapped a large log to the boom, lowered it across the river and succeeded in rigging up a sort of boson’s chair that got Bill and his passenger back across the river safely, as well as the man still stranded on the bulldozer. Kemano at that time boasted a hospital of sorts and they were taken there to be treated. It turned out that Bill was more seriously damaged than his passenger. He had broken off the instrument pedestal in the helicopter with his shin, and he was in considerable pain and some shock. Fortunately, Bill’s injuries were not serious and he was very quickly back flying again.17
Joan continued to live in the camp,