Village of Kaslo

Village of Kaslo

I was responsible for laying out the airport for the village of Kaslo. Either the people in Kaslo or

somebody with an airplane decided that Kaslo should have a little airstrip. There was a terrace on

a beach just west of Kaslo. I did the survey for the airport. It turned out to be quite a good little

airport, especially for emergencies. The approach coming off the lake was good. But at the other

end, you had to land and take off from one direction. The wind did not always make this easy!

I enjoyed helping create the place on government or Crown land. I put concrete controlled survey

monuments on the airport land, too. After a few years when they expanded the airport, they

knocked out one of my monuments. I have gone back several times to check. This is actually

very important. Airports are supposed to use proper and permanent positioning, allowing pilots

and others to use a GPS system and punch in the coordinates. The Kaslo airport needed these

systems because it is tucked into the mountainside along Creek Valley.

I did other projects in Kaslo. The hospital board had me survey a new hospital site there. I helped

define the potentially floodable land up the lakeshore. I created a parcel of land and donated the

tow plug for it, so they could make a roller park for the kids. I also worked for the arena in

Kaslo. I did the survey and donated the work to them. They had a plaque on the wall identifying

the people that donated to the arena. My name was not on the wall—so I raised a little ruckus. I

thought, “Son of a gun, you donate some work, and some people do not know what you have

done.” But donating your services is part of being a good citizen, even if it is not in your home

city.

The Village of Kaslo is built on land shaped like a fan that extends into the lake. The original

subdivision that was planned had to be cancelled because it reached into areas that would flood.

After the level of the lake dropped, this became useful land. I had a chance to work on the re-

subdivision of the area.

There were some interesting challenges. On the opposite side of Kaslo Creek, there was uneven

terrain— a nice beach but poorly laid out properties. It was laid out using an old system and did

not follow the contours of the land very well. I did what was called a replot, which is quite an

extensive exercise. When one owner owns all the property, it is no problem. I did one in Nelson

that was really a problem because a single owner did not want to participate; we had to use the

law to force them into it. But in Kaslo, we did not have any problem changing the shape of all

the properties. We used one of the parcels as the site for the ice arena. The finished subdivision

had a dozen nice houses overlooking the depression from the creek.

I also got involved with the water system as an engineer. Some of the old waterworks needed to

be rebuilt. I concluded that the water main from the intake down to the village had to be run

along the actual public road. You can do that in the municipalities, but the Highways Department

said we had to go through the bush on the hillside, a much more expensive route.

To push my proposal forward, I had to argue with the senior engineer for the department,

someone I knew quite well. I knew that the roadway was on the original railway route. That

opened the door to me to say that the government had usurped the right to put its road on another

strip of land. Actually, I did not know whether the government had done anything illegal or if it

had bought out the right of way from the old railway system. Boy, I had some strong arguments.

We got permission to proceed. An iron waterline was put down the ditch line of the highway,

much to the department’s concern. They would have to watch the pipeline in case it broke or got

banged for some reason, or one of their men happened to dig out the ditch into the waterline and

break it, causing it to wash out the highway. To this day, the waterline is working. I am happy

with the decision that I made to put it there. It saved the Village of Kaslo a million dollars or

more. A similar thing happened more recently in Nelson. They put the waterline along an

abandoned railway; they otherwise would have struggled to afford the pipeline. The railway had

been abandoned, and that was an easy place to put the pipeline.

On a different occasion, I was asked to survey out where two property owners were arguing over

a property line in Johnson's Landing, which is on the east shore of Kootenay Lake. You've got to

go to the end of the lake and then come down the east shore to get to Johnson's Landing. One

fellow argued that the other fellow's smaller house was on his property. He built a fence that

came up against the house and then skipped over it and continued on the other side.

The homeowner cut down the other fellow's fence. They were close to a fist fight. One of them

took a power saw and cut down all the fence posts and threw them away. I had to go in there and

survey it. I found out that the fellow who had built the fence was quite right.

The other fellow should have paid me for the work. But because he lost, he never paid me,

despite owing me, in today's dollars, at least two or three thousand to identify his property line. I

should have had them pay up in advance. Back in those days, you could typically trust people to

pay when you did work for them. I kept trying to get my money. The chap who was in the wrong

eventually moved close to Nelson. I told one of my chaps that if he could get that fellow to pay

his bills, he could have half of it. And I still remember my assistant thinking he could do it. He

went to get paid, but he never did. He was quite disappointed because he could have used the

money.

I did a subdivision for a chap in Kaslo who was working on rocky ground that was difficult to

work with. This developer said he liked working with rock. That subdivision turned out to be

quite successful, and we built a really good, stable road.

Another lot came up for sale down at Mirror Lake. They used to mine and saw out ice on a small

lake and put it on the sternwheeler and have it trucked or barged to Nelson, where it would be

put in what they called an icehouse. The ice would then be put on trains for air conditioning.

But anyway, there was a vacant and large piece of land. But because it was almost solid rock,

nobody had developed it in the past. The fellow who had done the subdivision in Kaslo decided

that he could handle that rock, too. I looked at it and backed down and told him not to do it. He

was adamant that he could handle it. He hired another surveyor-engineer to do the subdivision.

The Health Department approved it on the basis that water could be pumped from the lake into

the water system.

The project was approved without too much attention paid to sewage disposal. Fewer than half of

the lots that were created were acceptable for sewage disposal. There may have been a difference

of opinion among the health inspectors. I looked at some of the lots afterwards, just out of

curiosity, and saw that my original assessment was correct. The lots could not be laid out

uniformly; you had to really be careful and pick a site for each property. You had to look at

sewage disposal as well.

A few years later the rules changed. You had to have not only a suitable area for sewage but also

one for a backup or secondary system in case the area was flooded with debris and sewage.

Clearly, sewage management had become a central feature of rural and rural land development. I

convinced my son, Ken, to go back and get a master's degree in civil engineering and sewage

disposal—what they now call environmental engineering. He went back to school for another

two years. I sponsored him and, when he set up his business, paid for building little sewage

disposal compartments. He probably had six or eight tanks—four feet deep, four feet wide, eight

feet long—where he could test different soil conditions to prove how much soil was required for

proper sewage disposal.

When the rules around sewage tightened, surveyors and developers had big arguments with the

new breed of health inspectors who had to approve a subdivision or a creation of a lot. They

would make you do what was called a percolation task. You would dig a hole or two about two

feet deep in the area where you were going to put a sewage field, and you would saturate that

hole with six or eight inches of water and measure the rate that water was absorbed into the

ground within ten or so minutes.

I made special sticks with nails precisely one inch apart. You would put the stick in the hole with

a nail on it, and you would get the water level to the uppermost nail. Then you would time how

long it took for the water to recede down to the other nail. If it did not recede at a pretty good

rate, that ground was unacceptable.

With the Mirror Lake subdivision, I was right to presume sewage was going to be a problem with

the subdivision. We had a lot of properties with nice views. You could put a waterline anywhere

because you could pump water, but you did not pump sewage. Along the West Arm of Kootenay

Lake, the people started putting in sewage pumping systems. They would install a septic tank,

even below the house. Then they would install a pump to pump their effluent back up the hillside

and dispose of it that way.

We had reliable electric power that worked well when it was first put in. It works even better

today because our power system is much more reliable. Previously, you had to make your tank

quite large so that if the power was not available for a couple of days, you did not have to

discharge too much effluent. And when the power came back on, you could pump the sewage

back into the septic field.