Green door space once held an earthquake detector

Daniel Coulombe has a different take on what lies behind the green door.

Earlier this summer, Nunatsiaq News wrote about a seemingly out-of-place room blasted into the side of a hill in Iqaluit. Former Iqaluit mayor Bryan Pearson said it might have once been a radio room to help guide air traffic, but Coulombe disagrees.

How does he know? He works one floor above a room just like it.

"The concrete piers are for hosting seismometer equipment," he said. "It was a vault to hold some instruments to detect earthquakes. And those vaults are built very solid because you want to avoid any vibration… that will tamper with the data."

That's why the room behind the green door is covered with gravel, he said.

"I was surprised that Bryan didn't remember…," he said.

Coulombe is a technical service officer with the Meteorological Service of Canada, which has a room full of seismic gear at its office in the West 40 area of Iqaluit. The equipment monitors seismic activity all over the world and can detect the detonation of "a nuclear device anywhere on the planet," Coulombe said.

Coulombe said the equipment was moved from the location on the hill around 1968 when Environment Canada built its current home in the West 40. It housed analog equipment until the advent of digital seismometers around 1990.

At the West 40 site, Coulombe guides a visitor down a flight of stairs and though a cluttered hallway and opens up a door to reveal a small concrete room filled with what looks like a pile of cardboard boxes.

But those boxes are lined with foam insulation, and in some cases tinfoil, which helps protect the instruments from temperature swings.

Then down another flight of stairs, into the bowels of the building, is yet another room, a dead ringer for the one on the hill, which once held seismological equipment.

The size of those instruments shrank when digital technology came along, and this second room is now home to the building's furnace.