HENRY NORLANDE RUTTAN

HENRY NORLANDE RUTTAN

Winnipeg's First City Engineer

By George Siamandas

Henry Norlande Ruttan served as Winnipeg's city engineer from 1885-1914. He was born in Coburg Ontario in 1848. His father had developed heating and ventilation systems used in buildings and railway cars. Ruttan learned engineering on the job and did not attend a university. This was with the Grand Trunk Railway starting in 1868. He worked with Sanford Fleming who was building the TransContinental from Quebec to the Maritimes. Starting in 1874 Ruttan built the western leg of the railway.

In 1880 Ruttan began his own engineering business in Winnipeg working as a consultant on railways, and the needs of a rapidly growing municipality. In 1885 he was appointed city engineer. He was an honest man who resisted the corruption of the day. His greatest gifts to the city are the James Avenue Pumping Station and the Shoal Lake Aqueduct.

Ruttan was a staunch proponent of public ownership of utilities, including the city's own low rate power system, its own quarry, and asphalt paving plant. Winnipeg's sewage system also owes a lot to Ruttan. It helped reduce Winnipeg's atrocious death rate.

Ruttan designed Winnipeg's first artesian well system in 1900, which gave the first pure water for decades. But its volume was inadequate to serve the whole city (The north end did not have water at this time). And if a big fire broke out the pressure was inadequate.

By 1900 the Red was too polluted and in 1904 when a big fire broke out and river water was used it ended up polluting the water supply causing a typhoid outbreak. It would not be till 1919 that all Winnipeggers could have pure and abundant water.

Winnipeg was growing rapidly. Massive stone warehouses with wooden post and beam construction were springing up all over the warehouse district. The trade they did in supplying all of western Canada was so good they kept growing and new firms wanted to expand into Winnipeg. The major problem they were facing were Winnipeg's high fire insurance rates because of the reduced ability of the fire department to fight fires.

There simply wasn't enough water coming out of the fire hydrants to do the job. The answer a high pressure pumping station called the James Ave Pumping Station. When complete it became the pride of the City Waterworks and Fire Department and was partly responsible for the construction of additional warehouse capacity.

Most of the $1,000,000 cost in 1906 was raised from taxing downtown businesses. When finished it had the capacity to create pressures of 300 LB per square inch pushing 9,000 gal per minute and was the largest such plant in the world. Initially it drew water from the Red River and supplied water for drinking as well as fire fighting. But by the time the Shoal lake Aqueduct was completed it drew this fresh supply of water.

It’s a living museum of how the city's equipment and operations functioned 90 years ago. There is nothing else quite like it in North America. In 1962 the engines were converted to natural gas.

Col Ruttan also had a distinguished military career, which resumed during WW1. He had fought against the Fenians in 1866, was Captain of the Little Black Devils in 1883, and served in the 1885 Saskatchewan Rebellion. Ruttan died in 1925 at his home at 180 Westgate.

Ruttan served as head of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineers and was one of the best known engineers in Canada. At his retirement dinner held at the Fort Garry in 1914, Ruttan was declared "the supervising genius of Winnipeg's expansion."

According to Dr Norman Ball of the National Museum of Science and technology: "In his daily work he stood as symbol of strength, staying power and confidence."

"Ruttan left Winnipeg a much better place than he found it. And gave it a yardstick by which to measure all other city engineers."