As Brad Russell lay in a hospital bed, severe burns covering much of his body, his father posed a familiar question.
“Brad,” he said, “you’ve just been handed a bunch of lemons here. What are you going to do with them?”
Growing up, Russell had heard the query enough times to know the answer was to make lemonade. When he responded this day, he felt the need to add an exclamation point.
“I’m going to make a whole shitload of lemonade,” he said.
Nearly 17 years later, Russell remains a man of his word.
Now 35 and residing in Squamish, BC, Russell is articulate, benevolent and humble.
He has spent the past 11 years as a geotechnical engineer with BGC Engineering, rising through the ranks to become an office manager and co-developer of a company leadership program.
Russell works primarily on projects that utilize rock and soil to build containment structures for mine waste, known as tailings. His work sites include Hudbay’s tailings pond near Creighton.
“I enjoy the technical challenges that come with [the job],” he says. “I enjoy the opportunities to travel and work outdoors, to not just be in an office 9 to 5 every day. We’re a very progressive and sort-of free-thinking company that allows a lot of freedom for individuals to be creative and try things for themselves.”
Russell relishes the opportunity to protect people and the environment within an industry that is often thought of as environmentally disruptive. And he can’t praise his colleagues enough.
On the family front, he is married with a newborn daughter who is the apple of his eye.
As someone who celebrated his 30th birthday by scaling Tanzania’s famed Mount Kilimanjaro, Russell delights in the hiking, cycling and outdoor lifestyle abundant in Squamish.
In short, life is good, and he knows it.
“I definitely have a very happy life,” Russell says. “I have a great little family forming around me and I’m living in a place I really enjoy.”
Easygoing
Bradley Read Russell was born at Flin Flon General Hospital on May 14, 1981 to Stuart Russell and Brenda Russell. His middle name was inspired by his mother’s maiden name of Reader.
He was a content, easygoing youth, playful but cautious and, as he notes, “probably reasonably well behaved.” He was very active, too, playing hockey, baseball and golf, among other sports.
When he was 14, Russell began working at Phantom Lake Golf Course, where he eventually manned the pro shop. He also stocked shelves at the now-defunct Super Thrifty Drug Mart.
After graduating from Hapnot Collegiate in 1999, he landed a summer job at the HBM&S copper smelter. That fall, he moved to Saskatoon to attend the University of Saskatchewan, where he enrolled in the Bachelor of Science civil engineering program.
Russell, then 19, returned to Flin Flon in the summer of 2000 and again found seasonal work at HBM&S. On August 8 of that year, he was working the night shift in the smelter.
He normally helped operate the train that transported copper concentrate to the smelter’s enormous furnace. On this night, he was tasked with assisting in the shutdown of the furnace so that its brick lining could be replaced as per routine maintenance.
Russell began clearing away some of the sand that was used to prevent molten copper from fusing to the smelter infrastructure as it dried.
Water that was used to clean surrounding surfaces had accumulated over the crust of the cooling molten material in the furnace. That crust fractured, triggering a series of explosions that sent molten copper and brick spewing through the air – and later leading to an unsafe-workplace charge against the company.
At about 1:45 am, Russell was busy at work, his back toward the furnace.
Thundering roar
“I just remember the real like thundering roar of it when it exploded and then it just triggered an instinct from me to get off of this platform where I was and try to run towards an exit,” Russell recalls.
To flee, Russell had to rush past an opening in the furnace from which steam and red-hot material was discharging. At some point he was knocked to the ground, his respirator blown off his face.
“Once I was knocked over I remember not feeling like I was able to carry on towards the exit, so I just kind of curled up into a bit of a corner and tried to keep myself as small as I could and wait out whatever was going on,” he says.
While hunched down, Russell grabbed the respirator that dangled from his neck and held it to his face.
“I’m pretty sure that that saved my life because it managed to prevent steam from going into my lungs,” he says.
After about a minute of “thunder and rumbling,” Russell got up and found the exit. Out in the parking lot, he observed other injured men in extreme pain.
He lifted up one of his arms and noticed the skin between his leather glove and the cuff of his coveralls looked different. It was burnt, but it didn’t hurt. Yet.
Russell arrived by ambulance at Flin Flon General Hospital. With burns of varying degrees on 65 per cent of his body, he was sedated and flown to the burn unit at the University of Alberta hospital in Edmonton.
The explosions injured 14 smelter workers in all, including Steve Ewing, who would later pass away in hospital.
Familiar question
In Edmonton, Russell’s father, Stuart, asked him the familiar question about being handed lemons. Russell’s “shitload of lemonade” answer reinforced the positive attitude he was determined to maintain.
He began the long process of healing. Trips outside of the hospital became milestones. Setbacks were disappointing but also expected.
Russell underwent about six skin grafts. For him, the worst part was being prohibited from doing his rehabilitative exercises for several days after each graft.
“You feel like you’re doing everything you can to heal, but there’s just some things that are outside your control,” he says.
Before the accident, Russell was the type of person to look for silver linings, to avoid any urge to dwell or ask why. Afterwards, friends and family who came to Edmonton bolstered that outlook.
After two months in the burn unit, Russell transferred to physiotherapy to further regain his strength and stamina. Soon enough, he was able to attend an Edmonton Oilers game with friends and smelter coworkers who came to the city.
“There was normalcy coming back to life and I wasn’t just stuck in a hospital all the time,” he recalls. “Things like that really made me feel like progress was being made.”
Throughout his three months in hospital, Russell was unwavering in his plan to resume university as quickly as possible.
He had already missed most of the first semester, so returning to the University of Saskatchewan for the second semester became his goal. In January 2001, just five months after the accident, he was back in class.
Russell graduated just one year later than planned, in 2004, with his Bachelor of Science in civil engineering. He was ready to take on the world; he just didn’t know quite how. The idea came to combine his passion for golf with a career.
“I noticed that there was a lot of civil engineering aspects to golf courses,” he says.
Russell found a one-year master’s program in golf course architecture – “which a lot of people find hard to believe actually exists, but it is a real thing” – and moved to Scotland for his studies.
An internship with an architecture firm turned into a post-grad job helping to construct a new golf course in St. Andrews, Scotland.
“It was a dream job for anybody who would be working in the golf business,” Russell says.
About a year into his job in Scotland, Russell found an even better fit for himself at BGC Engineering, relocating to Vancouver in March 2006.
While at the company, he met a beautiful geoscientist named Margot Ellis. They were friends for years before they became, as he puts it, “a little bit more.”
The couple married in the spring of 2014. Last month, they welcomed their first child, a daughter, Ailsa. She is named after the Scottish island Ailsa Craig, which supplies granite for most of the world’s curling stones.
While Russell is far from his northern Manitoba roots and the family that remains there, he considers himself fortunate to live five hours from his dad, Stuart, and two-and-a-half hours from his older brother Ryan.
No detriment
Today, Russell recalls the smelter accident just a handful of times a year, and only in terms of how the near-fatal mishap shaped him.
“I definitely look back on it not as a detriment to my life, that my life today is not as good as it would have been if that hadn’t happened,” he says. “I look back on it and see that there were some positive things that came out in terms of my character and traits, that I was able to develop having gone through that experience.
“I was responsible for deciding the personal outcome of what [happened]. Yeah, it was an unfortunate thing that I was placed in that position, but I was responsible for how I allowed it to affect me and the rest of my life.”
In other words, it’s always possible to turn lemons into lots of lemonade.
