Down in the Deeps Safety is key underwater
By Bob Armstrong
Manitoba Business Magazine
Garth Hiebert, left, of Dominion Divers and other winners
in the Manitoba Business Magazine's 'Best in Business Practices Awards,' 2007.
Working alone under water is about as high risk a profession as you can find. For Winnipeg's Dominion Divers Ltd. safety comes first.
Co-owners, both divers, Garth Hiebert and Guy Dobson, are proud that in the company's history there has never been a serious injury.
Says Hiebert, "We scored 100 per cent on our safety audit. Its a very rigorous and specific program. You need required elements all to be carried out precisely."
The 2006 audit, by Hamilton Safety Associates, notes that: "The last independent audit was done in December 2003 and at that time the firm scored a remarkable 99 per cent, a score that was the highest achieved to date. This left a very narrow window to indicate improvement, however Dominion Divers has accomplished this by scoring a perfect 253 of a possible 253 points. This is a remarkable accomplishment and one that everyone can be justifiably proud of."
Considering some of the jobs the Winnipeg-based company does, from the Red River to the Arctic Ocean, the emphasis on safety is understandable.
Diving in the Red River to find stolen cars for client MPIC involves searching in complete blackness. A recent underwater construction job near Yellowknife, NWT, involved doing structural steel work to repair the debris grate at the inlet of a hydro electric dam.
Depending on the kind of job, divers may be operating rock drills or welding torches largely by feel.
"You're by yourself, it's black down there, and you can't take a break," says Dobson. "Warmth is also a big issue."
Sometimes safety means not just ensuring that water doesn't get into a diver's lungs, but that it doesn't even touch the diver's skin. One of the company's most high-profile jobs required diving into a room flooded by sewage at Winnipeg's North End sewage treatment plant. The company's diver had to search in complete darkness for a missing plate to cover the inspection hole over a broken sewage pump, so that the room could be drained and the pump could be repaired.
Though the media were fascinated by the story of diving into sewage, Dobson and Hiebert say it's nothing unusual to dive in a contaminated environment.
The company's divers also go underwater in pools of acidic pulp mill effluent to inspect or repair pipes. For contaminated-water dives, special suits are worn that keep all liquid away from the diver's flesh.
Commercial divers do a wide variety of tasks. They work on bridges, dams, pipelines, industrial plants, wharfs, offshore oil rigs and other kinds of infrastructure. Divers work on initial construction and on inspections, examining everything from dams to the bottoms of ships.
"There's a huge amount of underwater infrastructure," says Hiebert.
They also do salvage work, searching for stolen cars dumped in rivers and lakes and for equipment that has fallen through the ice on winter roads.
As a result, the company needs people with a very specific skill set.
"They need lots of good cutting, welding and construction know-how," says Hiebert. "We have 12 people in the company with construction backgrounds, especially Guy. He's a draftsman as well."
Being able to read blueprints and translate them into rebar and steel is just as important as knowing the intricacies of Boyle's Law (the natural laws governing the behavior of gases under pressure.)
In addition to knowing construction, the company's divers are all certified to a high level of underwater knowledge.
"Our policy is to hire only trained divers to the unrestricted surface supplied level," says Hiebert. To meet the unrestricted surface supplied standard takes approximately 1,000 hours of training, with training dives to 165 feet below the surface.
Hiebert and Dobson started with Dominion Divers as underwater workers for founder Gil LaMothe, who started the firm in 1965. The partners, who took over in 2003, have been with the company since 1985 (Hiebert) and 1994 (Dobson).
They're building on the company's long history by focusing on quality work, keeping mobilization costs for out-of-town jobs reasonable, careful investment in gear and an expansion to better serve the Ontario market.
Garth Hiebert of Dominion Divers with his family at the 2007 Manitoba Business Magazine 'Best in Business Practices Awards.
As the only commercial diving firm between Alberta and southern Ontario, Dominion Divers covers a wide territory. Last year, the company opened an office in Thunder Bay. From Sault St Marie to Kenora, dams, pulp and paper mills, and Great Lakes ships provide plenty of work for commercial divers. The company also looks to Northern Manitoba, where it does inspection and maintenance work on Manitoba Hydro's dam system. And high oil prices are likely to create opportunities to work on offshore rigs in the Canadian Arctic.
A basic working crew for Dominion Divers consists of four people. Two divers will take turns, with one working underwater and the other on the surface prepared to go in for a rescue. One worker helps the diver dress for the water and tends the divers air supply and another is the supervisor.
For deep dives, the company has a decompression chamber, which can be used to help a diver safely adjust to the air at the surface. It can also be used to treat a diver injured with the bends a potentially deadly condition that results when a diver comes to the surface too quickly from deep under water.
A decompression chamber may sound like something you'd find on an ocean dive site but, in fact, the first time Dominion Divers used theirs was at the Gardner Dam in southwestern Saskatchewan. Which goes to show that if you're good at what you do, you're ready to do it anywhere.
