When the past bites back

Like all other organized communities in Nunavut, Iqaluit’s history is short, so short that the community’s very beginnings still reside in the memories of people who are still alive today.

But even though Iqaluit’s history is short, it’s made of many layers – literally.

Over the past couple of summers, residents of Iqaluit’s Lower Base neighbourhood discovered how easily those layers can be pealed away. Work crews, while digging trenches for utilidor lines, have unearthed the nearly-forgotten refuse of the 1950s: long-buried fuel drums and deposits of what appear to be 50- to 60-year-old fuel spills.

They’re turning up in an area of Iqaluit that, in a time before the erection of the tank farm, was once a fuel dump for the U.S. air force, a great outdoor warehouse for fuel drums. In those days, environmental regulations, as we know them now, barely existed, and even if they did, there was no one around to enforce them.

Homeowners in the neighbourhood now worry if it’s safe for their children to play outside on top of soil that may be contaminated, and some worry that it might now be more difficult for them to sell their houses.

But at the same time, it’s not clear what should be done about it. It’s not even clear that anything ought to be done about it.

Those who believe that a clean-up should be done, will, understandably, turn first to the City of Iqaluit. That, however, is the level of government least able to pay for such a costly undertaking, and it’s extremely unlikely that the city would ever accept responsibility for cleaning up a problem that they did not create.

As for the Government of Nunavut, it has the ability to do some types of environmental testing and to act as a public health watchdog. But the GN doesn’t appear to have the capacity to do much more than that. And it’s highly unlikely that the GN will even begin to start looking within its budget for clean-up funds.

That leaves the federal government, which has already committed many millions of dollars to clean up numerous contaminated sites that are much bigger and present a far more serious threat to the environment. As it is, the federal government is not accepting responsibility even for the North 40 site despite the City of Iqaluit’s insistence that it’s Ottawa’s problem.

In this case, Iqaluit residents have no choice but to accept what the past has thrown up into their faces and to go on living with it, as they have for at least half a century. JB