Holberg, BC

The big round white object that mariners see between Winter Harbour and the top of Vancouver Island was not always there, not was it as you see it now. The original was built around 1954 and died the night of February 10, 1957.

I was the duty officer that night in the radar installation at Holberg atop Mount Brandes, a 670-metre hill some 16 kilometers east of the end of Vancouver Island overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

The unit was at the western end of the Pinetree line of long-range radar stations built to watch for incoming Russian bombers during the Cold War.

The dome that enclosed the 20-metre steel mesh radar sail was made of neoprene and supported by air pressure. Power for the entire station was supplied by three 200KW Vivian diesel engines some 250 metres below the site.

Among the three towers, radar, height finders and radio antennas on top of the hill, the anemometer, a device for measuring wind force and speed, was perched on a pole 30 metres above the ground. It was windy and cold when I reported for duty at 4pm. Eight kilometers away and shielded by a hill, our fireplace was glowing, the family was warm and I wished I weren’t on duty that night.

As my crew stepped off the six-wheel drive truck and into the concrete bunker, the wind screaming through the guy wires of the various antenna slammed the door with unusual force. I immediately checked the cypher room where the anemometer chart recorded wind speeds. Sixty-five knots! We would be in for a rough night. I reminded the operators to call the duty officer if the wind passed 80 knots and left for the duty rostrum.

We watched the storm approaching, measured direction, cloud mass and density and frontal speed on the radar screens. It was moving fast and I alerted the Vancouver weather office.

At 9pm, the cypher room reported a gust at 84 knots with dropping temperatures. I said I’d be right down. On the way I passed an airman just in who reported freezing rain outside. I called the powerhouse, briefed the engineer and settled down to monitor the anemometer chart which by now was dancing up and down like a yo-yo: 79 knots, 88 knots, 84, 90, 87, 96, 92.

Outside, the power cables stretching up the hill were swaying to and fro but their engineering had left enough space between them to prevent them touching and arcing out the circuit breakers and/or blowing the transformers.

However, the engineers had not factored in an ice storm. Temperatures were now below freezing and when the rain hit the cables it turned to ice which increased their weight and stretched them further. Inside, the chart was now jumping in the 110-knot range.

I phoned the various positions on the hill to warn them and the powerhouse. The Sergeant told me the lines were whipping like crazy in the fury of the storm and some trees were down.

As I hung up, the chart registered 121 knots and climbing. At 126 knots, it suddenly fell to zero. I couldn’t believe it and tried to open an outside door. I couldn’t budge it but I heard the howl outside like … bagpipes?

Then the lights went out and the clatter of teletypes ceased. It was eerie until we got emergency battery lights going only to find there was no radar. Then a thunderous boom reverberated from above and the wind’s howl increased as the trapdoor to the top floor, where the radar sail had been slowly coasting, was sucked open and papers scattered like leaves as the big breeze entered the operations rooms. One of my Sergeants climbed the ladder and with Herculean efforts managed to close and bolt the trapdoor. He reported the wind nearly tore his hair out.

We rode out the shrieking storm until morning, powerless except for phone lines with which we kept the outside world informed of conditions at the west end of the Island. At times, I thought the hill trembled.

Sixteen hours later, with the dawn and dying wind, we surveyed the damage. The top of the radar tower was a sheet of ice and nothing else. No radar sail, no bubble, nothing. Just a few bits of neoprene left under the ring that had held it down before everything was torn away.

Investigations later showed what happened. The ice stretched the power lines so much that in their frenzied aerial dance they collided, arced and blew the circuit breakers.

When the power failed, the neoprene bubble balloon deflated and the coasting six-tonne radar sail, with its machine edges, ripped a gash in the bubble which allowed the wind to tear it free, and send it flying down over the valley. The sail also rapidly tumbled away.

For years afterward, our personnel found bits of the bubble scattered among the trees of the valley northwest of the tower. The radar sail was found well below its tower, a tangled mess of wires and twisted metal. The other two domes survived because their radar sails were fixed in position.

We had been arguing with defence headquarters to provide us with an auxiliary power source for years to cope with just such a situation because 100-knot winds at Holberg are not uncommon.

Oh, they sent one all right. It was sitting at the dock at the head of Holberg Inlet, 16 kilometers away, having arrived by barge that very afternoon. It was no longer needed. The replacement was made of rigid plastic geodetic panels.

Because the anemometer blew away, we had no idea just how strong those winds really got. Let me convert 126 knots to miles by multiplying 126 by 38 and dividing that by 33. (Naval people taught me that). That will get you 145 miles per hour. Kilometers? Multiply 145 by eight and divide by five and you now have 232 kilometers per hour and that is only what we measured.

To give one an idea of the power of that storm, try imagining the last blow we had in Victoria on December 5 as three times stronger than it was.

This article was written by Jamie MacGregor and published in the Victoria Islander on January 17, 1999. Victoria resident Jamie MacGregor spent 25 years with the RCAF, earning a DFC while flying with Pathfinders during the Second World War.