One of the biggest problems with living in a remote area is access to facilities that we take for granted. If you want to watch TV, you need both a satellite dish and power to run the dish and TV. If you want to have a shower, you'll need some way to pump the water as well as heat it. If you want to cook some ham and eggs, you'll need to find a way to keep the food cool, or it'll turn into Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham. Then, you have to have a source of heat to cook the ham and eggs. If you want to make a telephone call, you need a radio telephone (telephone lines don't run to the mine). If you want to read a book in the evening, you'll need a source of light.
We can get of these things in our homes simply by turning on the TV, cracking open the water valves for the shower, opening the fridge and turning on the stove elements. You might even have a favourite chair and reading light for those evenings curled up with the book. However, there are no lines running to Holloway Bar. No telephone, no power, no cable TV. So, Christina and Scott have spent the last few years trying to put enough infrastructure into place to be able to have all of the amenities of home.
In the first few years at the mine, food was kept cold with a propane fridge, cooked on a propane stove, and water heated with a propane water heater. If you wanted to take a shower or read a book, you needed power to pump the water up from McDame Creek or turn on the lamp (unless you had very good eyes, or it was near the longest day of the year at the end of June!). So, the only alternative was to run the diesel generator - at a cost of around $50 a day. And this was when you could still afford to buy fuel...
Life's a little different now. Lights and TV are available with the flick of a switch. Cooking and hot water still mostly requires burning some propane, but there's an electric fridge and freezer to keep things cool and frozen. The water is no longer pumped up from the river - it just flows through camp at the rate of about 5 litres per second. This has been made possible with the addition of a large (1000 kg) bank of two-volt batteries and a water turbine generator system.
You can see the turbine in the photo to the left. It spins up to quite a few thousand RPMs with the pressure of water Scott's feeding it. It's wired into the control panel which sits in front of the large bank of batteries. The batteries are continuously charged when the system runs, but the batteries will supply most camp power for several days.
Scott's at the top of the waterline. The water is collected from a stream in the white plastic pipe and fed into the headbox, which has a 3" black plastic pipe as an outlet. It looks relatively peaceful here, but the water builds pressure as it drops - and supplies over 100 psi of pressure at the bottom - enough to drive the turbine.
This is the outflow from the turbine - it's just a trickle here at the outlet. But, a lot of the water is diverted past the turbine and supplies all of the camp water. So, even without power to run a pump, there's always water for washing, showers, and general camp needs (including supplying water for fire suppression purposes). Excess water runs in to the pond.
