“You are responsible for damages caused by your kids,” says Arviat business

Kids in Arviat like to jump on crates like these from 2010 in the community, which contain construction materials. (FILE PHOTO)

When Charles Brake heads to work in the morning at the yard of Sanaqatiit Construction Ltd. in Arviat, he never knows what he’ll find: on the morning of Sept. 17 it was a hole in the fence, which he had to repair.

Another day someone had fiddled with the motor of a “zoom boom” — a piece of heavy machinery — and that took him hours to fix.

“You don’t know what to expect,” Brake said about the vandalism plaguing the company’s yard in the Kivalliq community.

Other days he’ll find broken lights or missing items — nothing major so far, but what really alarms Brake is the possibility that some of the young kids running in and around the crates will get hurt.

A watchman is on site, he said. “But the kids don’t listen. They just look and keep on.”

That’s frustrating, he admits.

So far it’s been “a lot of mischief” with damages that cost only a few dollars to repair, but with a lot of new construction now under way in Arviat he wants to avoid more costly destruction at other sites around town.

Recently, Brake asked the community radio to deliver the following message — that anyone with information on the young vandals should call the RCMP.

He also attached a message to parents that said “you are responsible for damages caused by your kids on new construction projects and you will be charged for damages. So please talk to your kids to stay away from job sites.”

And there are a lot of kids — and parents — in Arviat, one of the largest communities in Nunavut, with a population of about 2,500, which has the highest birth rate in the territory.

More than 60 per cent of its population is under the age of 16.

But Arviat is not alone in dealing with costly damage created by youth vandalism:

• young vandals in Cambridge Bay caused thousands of dollars of damages to the recently-closed youth group home, an oil spill which dumped about 11,000 litres of waste oil in the Kitnuna Corp. yard, and many broken windows;

• young vandals in Rankin Inlet have stolen all-terrain vehicles and damaged a bus; and,

• young vandals in Kugluktuk have since Labour Day weekend caused more that $50,000 worth of damage — and some say up to $100,000 — to the Kugluktuk co-op and its surrounding warehouses.