ROV Recovers Body 160 M Under Arctic Ice
The SEAMOR Chinook ROV and Canada’s elite national police diver training team from the National Underwater Recovery Training Centre have accomplished a historic feat north of the Arctic Circle: the RCMP’s deepest successful recovery of an accident victim at a depth of 160 m under the ice.
At Bathurst Inlet in western Nunavut in January 2022, a worker died in an accident while working on the Back River gold-mining project. It happened when his bulldozer, which was working on widening a 170-km ice road from the port facility to the Goose project site, fell through the ice about 6 km outside the port. The bulldozer came to rest at a depth of 160 m under the ice, a depth completely inaccessible to police dive teams and in extremely challenging Arctic conditions.
For this mission, the team elected to integrate the five-function Alpha Arm, an electronic arm for observation-class ROVs. The Alpha, from BluePrint Labs in Australia, is among a wide range of third-party sensors that can be integrated with a Chinook system.