Icing Problems along the CANOL Wartime Pipeline, 1944.
Extreme winter temperatures caused serious icing problems along the CANOL pipeline from Norman Wells to Whitehorse. The photo at left was taken at Dodo Canyon some 50 kilometres west of Norman Wells, along the path of the oil pipeline and highway into the Mackenzie Mountains. A ten-centimetre pipeline is buried under the ice that has built up from the canyon creek flow constantly erupting over the top of the ice and building an overburden of over four metres in depth (a telephone-pole top is barely visible at bottom left). The maintenance crew pictured here was constantly at work throughout the winter at temperatures ranging as low as -40 C to supply the ten pumping stations located along the 933-kilometre line to the Whitehorse refinery. One of the six-wheel drive army trucks has become bogged down in the soft ice and is about to be pulled back onto the firm ice-road by the Caterpillar tractor to the right.
The photo at the right. taken some 150 kilometres to the west of Norman Wells and beyond the continental divide into the Yukon, further illustrates icing difficulties created by underground water erupting over the ice and building ice walls three to four metres thick. In this case the ice wall threatens to engulf the highway. The oil barrels set in the foreground right were kept lit constantly to thaw the ice and carry the resulting run-off into a culvert buried beneath the roadway. The man in the parka, an employee of Imperial Oil and CANOL, is standing on the highway over the buried oil line and culvert threatened by the advancing ice.
An enormous quantity of oil was consumed just to keep the small pipeline operational over the winter. This consumption considerably reduced flows to the Whitehorse refinery, which only operated for eleven months after opening in April 1944. It produced a total of 150,000 cubic metres oil. In 1947, it was purchased by Imperial Oil which transported it in about 7,000 pieces to Edmonton, where it was reassembled to become that city's first refinery.
