A lot of things don’t cut ice with fishing folk up here but local inventor Mike Olyarnick isn’t one of them.

Olyarnick invents ice-boring and ice-cut­ting equipment that has made him the toast of net fishers and winter road builders on Lake Winnipeg. Now, he’s set his sights on Red River flood-fighting. The invention is a humun­gous Texas chainsaw — about the length of an eight-seater toboggan. Olyarnick hopes it can cut up the next Red River ice jam like a Texas chainsaw massacre — of ice, natur­ally.

Breaking up ice is a vulnerable spot in the province’s flood defences. Without icebreak­ing efforts last year, river levels would have been four feet higher at Selkirk, flooding that city, said Steve Topping, Manitoba Water Stewardship executive director.

But there were too many breakdowns with new “prototype” ice-cutters — at one point both ice-cutters were in the shop being serviced — and the province doesn’t want to resort to using dynamite, like in the United States.

In Gimli, the money’s on Olyarnick.

Olyarnick, 73, has been making machines since he was 15 when he built two snow planes — a forerunner to the snowmobile that were driven by a large propeller, like a hydroplane.

His specialty is customizing machines for ice fishers. His bestseller is an ice auger for drilling ice-fishing holes, seen on the back of many bombardiers around here.

The augers are also used to freeze winter roads. The spiral bit bores through ice and brings up the water along the edges of the spiral. Winter roads need added freezing where currents lick away at the bottom of the ice.

“There aren’t many people who’ve been on the ice that don’t know Mike,” said Gimli­based commercial fisher Dave Olson. “He’s well-known on Lake Winnipeg, and around northern Manitoba.”

Olyarnick has built attachments for bombardiers like roof racks and snowplow fronts, and a scissor-lift for lifting tubs of fish on whitefish boats. He’s made helicopter platforms, airplane-movers (special trail­ers), log-splitters, stump-removers, brush­cutters, paint-shakers, and is nearly finished a bicycle rack for the local Sobeys.

Perhaps his best invention to date is a hydraulic system for running fishing net under the ice — a “net letter-outer,” if you will — operated with a foot pedal so the fisherman’s hands are free. Olson calls the device “ingenious.”

Customers say Olyarnick is friendli­est when he’s in the throes of inventing something but can get a little cranky when between projects.

Wife Delores says ideas will hit her husband and, while seated at the kitchen table, he’ll start drawing them in the white margins of that day’s Winnipeg Free Press,

while she tries to set dinner.

“I’m more focused on my ice-cutter than anything,” said Olyarnick, who runs Park­side Machine and Service in Gimli with son Dale.

Ice-cutting is a big issue in flood protec­tion. Communities north of Winnipeg only get Red River flooding when there’s an ice jam, say municipal leaders.

In the Red River flood of 1997, the prov­ince hired commercial fishermen to use their augers to drill holes in the river ice — a Swiss-cheese effect — from the north floodway outlet to Lake Manitoba, to help with breakup.

Last year, the province used two ice­cutters newly built by John Szukiewicz at Selkirk Machine Works. There were breakdowns but that’s to be expected with a prototype, said Topping. Pritchard Engin­eering has worked with the Selkirk Machine model, and the province is hoping for some big improvements.

That said, a better mousetrap is certainly welcome, said Topping. Olyarnick believes his saw will cut both deeper and faster than existing ice-cutters. It’s built to cut half a metres deep at 30 metres per minute, or a kilometre-and-a-half an hour. But he says it can cut up to a metre deep. He will give it vigorous testing in February and March.

In flood protection, the ice is cut in five­metre grids, but not all the way through or else water would rise through cracks and refreeze. The cutting is to weaken the ice so it can be broken up by the province’s two Amphibex icebreakers.

The ice-cutters are designed to be at­tached to the Caterpillar-type amphibious Wolverine vehicles. An Amphibex follows behind, rising and dropping on the ice to break the ice.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/columnists/A-new-anti-flood-hero–82673432.html

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