George Moennich first encountered DCL while working for Atlas Construction at Camp Gagetown, New Brunswick. He joined the Corporation officially in 1968 in Lahr, Germany, and retired in 1995.
• The station’ s centralized hot water heating system was the largest in Canada at the time.
• The camp was officially opened on July 1, 1958, with a building and infrastructure cost of $ 37 million.
Camp Gagetown was a very interesting project in that it started from scratch— we helped to take it from bushland to a full Army base, recalled Joe Bland, adding that it was like building a small town. It was the whole works, right from the ground up.
While DCL was assisting DND with the contracting process at Gagetown, it was also working on other Army bases across the country, including Valcartier, Petawawa, London, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary— collectively, known as the Home Station Development Program, because each location became the geographic and philosophical“ home” of one of Canada’ s major Army units.
Introducing DCL … Camp Gagetown, 1954— George Moennich Atlas Construction, whose headquarters were in Montreal, had been awarded the contract for constructing roads, area grading, and installing underground services for the first quadrant of what was to become Camp Gagetown. My job as the( Atlas)“ office engineer” was to prepare the field books of our five field engineers, with all of the survey information required for them to do the layout work.
While preparing the field book with the layout information for a large, sweeping, close-to-90-degree curved section of the service tunnel that was to house the heating lines emanating from the Central Heating Plant, I came to the conclusion that the survey details shown on the drawings didn’ t add up … the information on the drawings must be wrong. Unusual! As I made my way to the DCL Field Office, I noticed that it was already past their quitting time, but I thought I would take a chance on someone still being there.( I must admit that I was always a bit envious of their 8 a. m. to 5 p. m. day.)
BREAKING NEW GROUND DEFENCE CONSTRUCTION CANADA
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