We call them a modified work day
because of the heat.
We were pushing close to 50 degrees
Celsius in the daytime.
I'm pretty lucky because I'm from Windsor and
Windsor in the summertime gets up to about 40
in August when we get the hot summers.
So for me I was able to adapt
pretty quick to the temperature.
It was really humid down there,
it's humid in Windsor too.
I knew other guys from up North and
they were having big problems because
they just could not work in that extreme heat
for the whole day so we ended up
having to basically have extended lunch hours.
You'd start early in the morning,
probably about 4:30, 5:00 o'clock in the morning,
work during the day, probably shut down for
lunch for maybe 2 hours or so, take a little siesta,
work for a couple of more hours in the later day,
evening, once things started to cool down,
when the sun come around a bit more.
So it was different that way.
The trucks the drivers were in were those
old deuce and a half trucks which were basically
Vietnam War technology trucks with diesels.
So you had to drop all the sides down on
the engines and everything else to try
to keep the engines cool.
They didn't want to, they're diesels,
they like to run hot, right, so the guys in the
cabs were just boiling.
Some of the trucks they actually ended
up pulling the tops off of them,
tried to turn them into convertibles
just to get the air flow going through it.
You pull the windows out of them,
that kind of stuff, but then you
had to wrap the cabin ballistic blankets and
put extra heavy plates in them,
just for the mine protection so that put a lot
more wear and tear on the engines,
put a lot more heat on the engines.
It was difficult but again, get to bed early,
up really early,
it wasn't a 9 to 5 job that's for sure.