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This is the beautiful Ottawa Valley.
In the fields below us have been found the bones of Bowhead whales.
10,000 years ago, the enormous Wisconsin glaciers
receded,
leaving behind an arm of water reaching all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.
It is remembered today as the Champlain Sea.
The escarpment on the right marks what was the north eastern shore of this huge body
of water.
It was so deep that the sites of the modern day cities of Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec
were submerged under hundreds of feet of ocean and glacial run off.
Sediments and aquatic life sifted down and built up great beds of sandstone, clay and
gravel
along what are now the foothills of the Laurentian and Appalachian mountain ranges
to the north and south of the St. Lawrence River valley.
These are two of the oldest mountain regions in the world,
and consist of Precambrian rock formations which are more than 540 million years old.
This is the Canadian Shield.
As the glaciers receded, the land sprung up, emptying the sea,
scraping rock and pushing gravel into the forms of the land as it exists today.
Great shoals of sandstone stretch along both sides of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence River
Valleys.
You can clearly see here how the layers of sand and sediment
were laid down over the millennia and bound together by heat and pressure.
This type of sandstone is found close to the earth’s surface.
The Ohio sandstone used for the architectural detailing and carvings on the West Block building
however is a “freestone”, which simply means free of sedimentary lines.
This is because it has been formed much deeper in the earth,
in some cases hundreds of feet below the surface,
and been subjected to greater pressures
which make it more homogeneous in mineral content and in colour.
Quarries at Nepean, near Ottawa, supplied the original walling stone
for the Parliamentary Precinct, (including the West Block).
These have been mostly used up and built over by urban sprawl
However, an almost identical formation is being quarried today
at the village of Saint Canute, north of Montreal,
which provides most of the replacement stone for the West Block restoration.
Similarly, the Potsdam quarry in northern New York State being closed,
a close mineral cousin is being quarried at Inverary Ontario,
just north east of Kingston, to replace and augment our supplies
of the red architectural stone detailing.
Deep limestone deposits are found on what was once the seabed,
formed by the living and dying of billions and billions of marine animals,
their skeletal remains crushed together under the weight of successive ice ages.
The original limestone for the building was quarried south of Ottawa
and known as Gloucester or Rideau Grey.
These quarries have long ago been taken over by the road building and concrete industries,
and the stone blasted out of the ground which makes it unacceptable for use as a building
stone.
However in the same manner as the sandstone, the St. Marc quarry just west of Quebec City
yields an almost identical Ordivician limestone that we use to rebuild
the West Block foundations and interior faces of the exterior walls.
So its really hard for people to understand just how old the stones we use are.
So I use a little trick. If you take this two inches, this point being the year Zero
and this my thumb being the year 2012, and each inch represents a thousand years,
and you divide 480 million years into inches, we could cover a distance,
going straight over the North Pole from here in Ottawa, to Dacca, Bangladesh
which is a huge distance of 7,575 miles.
That's how old our stones are.
In the Ordivician Age there were only two land masses covering the earth,
one at the North Pole and one at the South.
All the rest was water. And yet, under the waters of what is now North America,
our building stones were being formed. Cool, eh?
Well, my name's Billy Quinn. I'm a stonemason with RJW-Gem Campbell.
Interviewer: And you're a qualified stonemason?
Yep, this is what they tell me.
Yeah, I obtained my Red Seal in New Brunswick where its a compulsory trade.
I've know Bobby since I started with the trade and periodically I'd get in touch with him
looking for a job working for him and why I got into the trade
in the first place is because of the restoration and preservation aspects appealed to me so
much.
Its a world that's much bigger than what you might find in the construction end of things.
You've got the preservation you've got the engineering aspects of these old buildings
as well as all the different materials and how they pertain to their construction
as well as the preservation aspects of those materials - the "fabric" of the buildings
as they call it.
At Saint Canute is a hard quartzite sandstone and that seam travels
for quite a ways and its a material that's naturally bedded sedimentary stone.
So the bed heights in the quarry, which is to say the vertical heights,
between separation lines that you'll see in the quarry -
those are just lines where there is enough foreign matter that was deposited in a layer
at one point in its formation to make a nice tidy place for the crack to form
- horizontal crack - then the beds are lifted using machinery, drilled, plugged and feathered
The process to split the stones is a very old process basically involves two feathers
and a plug.
The plug gets driven down between the feathers and it forces the stone apart.
And if the boys just pull that you'l see that all of these have been split now very quickly.
Very powerful little piece of equipment.
And been used for hundreds of years.
- and extracted using machinery out in very large slabs, blocks, whatever the case may
be.
And then processed into smaller units.
And the unit you saw is essentially a unit that would be large enough
that moving it is cost effective and small enough that the piece of equipment
intended to move it can move it.
Its a size the folks in the cut shack can handle it
and our equipment can handle it in the courtyard.
From there the preferred stone that's to be cut from it is measured
and cut with various techniques.
Drilled, plugs and feathers to cut it to length,
they may use plugs and feathers to cut it to height along the bed lines -
then its placed up on a workbench or a banker and worked into a piece of stone.
It has to be properly squared -
it has to be rock faced so we have a presentable face of the stone to go into the wall
- at which point it is hoisted up into the scaffold and placed in the wall
by one of us.