Get out your wallet: it’s pothole season in Iqaluit

A vehicle takes a jarring and potentially expensive lurch into a pothole in front of Inuksuk High School May 3. (PHOTO BY DAVID MURPHY)

(Updated 5:10 p.m.)

Iqaluit’s bylaw department is warning residents to slow down and not veer around potholes onto oncoming traffic.

From the Iqaluit Enforcement Twitter feed this morning, a tweet said, “Save your vehicle and slow down on Iqaluit dirt roads.”

Chief enforcement officer Kevin Sloboda said the point of the tweet wasn’t to scare people into thinking they may get a ticket if they round a pothole illegally, but to tell people to slow down, watch the road and take into consideration the weather conditions.

“Our main message from that is to slow down and avoid going into the other lane of traffic, because it is a charge,” said Sloboda. “If you’re at 10 km down the road, those potholes are hard to get through. So if you’re going 40 km, then you could lose control of the vehicle.”

“We haven’t handed out any tickets, but we don’t want you to be driving on the wrong side of the road.”

The owner of Pai-Pa Taxi, Craig Dunphy, said, however, that getting a ticket for such an offense is “ridiculous.”

“Why don’t they spend more money on something useful,” said Dunphy.

He said potholes on Iqaluit roads are worse this year than last year so far, due to the high snowfall this winter.

“Blame mother nature,” he said. “They’re quite deep and getting worse.”

Michel Gilbert, owner of Upper Base Garage, said he has seen some “insane” potholes near the entrance of the hospital, close to where he lives, and says he has to go around them.

But he understands why the bylaw department is cautioning drivers.

“Look, it’s dangerous going in the other lane. They want to do a safe thing. But they need to put pressure on the city to put more gravel in,” he said.

Driving over speed bumps frequently severely damages a car’s suspension over time, and some could pay the price for following the rules of the road and not swerve around potholes.

“If the suspension goes, like a Subaru we did here last week, it costs around $1,600,” said Gilbert about a 2004 Subaru Forrester SUV, for which he had to replace all four shocks.

Gilbert wants police to put pressure on the city to fix the pothole problem, but the city’s roads foreman, Paul Barrieau, said it’s not that easy.

“It’s this type of the year that potholes are everywhere,” said Barrieau. “We fill them every morning with gravel… It clears it up for a short period of time and within half an hour to an hour it [turns] to mush again.”

Barrieau said his team gets up at 6 a.m. every morning to fix certain potholes around the city, but not much can be done until the temperature warms up and the snow and water don’t turn the material into mush.

“It needs to be done, people complain so we try to do our best.”

He said as soon as it does dry out on the streets, however, asphalt will be put into place so the problem won’t be as severe as it is now.