A local company is offering a $2,500 reward for information leading to a conviction after a worker narrowly avoided injury by heavy steel parts that shot out of the company's rock crusher one day last month.
Lyle Gully, vice-president of Bob's Welding Ltd., said he believes the 12 pieces of steel were put in the machine deliberately, sometime between the evening of Aug. 18 and the morning of Aug. 21.
It happened at a rock quarry outside of town, close to the airport.
“They fired up (the machine) Monday morning and … it shot back out of the cone there,” Gully said of one of the steel pieces. “It just missed the tower van where the operator sits in. If it was another two feet over, we would've had a seriously hurt person.”
Wes Bergeron, a supervisor with the company, was sitting in the three-metre-high control tower when the incident happened.
He saw the piece of steel fly over the tower and land in the yard where he said workers normally shovel.
Luckily, no one was roaming about when the object went flying through the air, but “it could have taken someone's life,” said Bergeron.
He explained the steel parts appear to be teeth used for digging with heavy equipment.
“They vary in size – 20 to 40 pounds – so you could imagine one of those flying 20 feet in the air and hitting someone,” he said. “Hard hat or not, I don't think you're going to make it.”
Gully said he didn't know where the objects came from.
While the machine has magnets designed to find objects like the pieces of steel, there were too many for it to pick up at once, said Bergeron.
As soon as the first one went through the air, he stopped the machine and did a walk-around.
He then called all four workers on site into the tower when he realized the pieces were in the machine, he said, adding everyone was “shaken up.”
Bergeron had to use a torch to cut one piece out of the machine, and the company has now added
screens outside the control tower windows for protection, he said.
“Someone could have been killed,” said Bergeron.
Gully said the incident has since been reported to the RCMP as he is concerned about his employees' safety.
In his 38 years in business, he said he has never experienced anything like this before.
The Mounties are investigating the incident and are asking anyone with information to contact Inuvik RCMP, according to RCMP spokesperson Robert Frizzell.
