BOILER RENTALS AND THE OCCASIONAL HOLLYWOOD MOVIE

Tuesday, 03 January 2012 13:34

Name of Company: Bighorn Boilers

City: Rocky Mountain House

Year Established: 2000

Number of Employees: 4

Bighorn Boilers is a small, portable steam boiler rental company that specializes in plant turnarounds, heating tanks and cleaning vessels. And while the Rocky Mountain House company has worked on many projects, including the Bonnie Glen gas plant decommissioning, it has a far bigger claim to fame.

Bighorn Boilers has been responsible for the special effects in many blockbuster movies. Nine years ago, operations manager Trevor Dykstra was contracted by Hollywood and since then, his work on movie sets has included controlling chimney smoke on house sets, making snow, and creating the effects for tornados, volcanoes, wind and fog. In a recently released movie, the ending called for the entire set to be blown up. Bighorn Boilers made it look like it had. 

Dykstra can’t say which movies his company has worked on as there are clauses in contracts barring him from doing so. Still, chances are if a movie were filmed in Alberta and it contains special effects, Bighorn Boilers played a role.

Here’s one example: “We had two big nozzles and a blue screen,” Dykstra says of the effects created for one film. “Each time they’d tell us when to snort, we’d turn on and off valves to make it look like a bear snorting. When they took it back to the movie screen, they put the bear’s face around the nozzles.”

Members of the staff at Bighorn Boilers seem to be amazed at their good fortune. And while Dykstra admits that “we don’t mingle with the movie stars, but we do get to meet them,” he pauses and adds, “It certainly gives us something to talk about.”