Dollars for snow fence

Iqaluit’s city council has approved plans to spend $350,000 on repairs and upgrades to the snow fences built last winter near the Road to Nowhere.

That’s $50,000 more than council initially pledged to spend on the project. But Michele Bertol, the city’s director of lands and planning, said her department could make up the difference with savings from other projects that have come in under budget.

The snow fence upgrades, voted on at a council meeting this Tuesday, are part of a plan developed by consultants from the firm Rowan Williams Davies & Irwin Inc.

The bulk of the $350,000 will go towards building another 115 metres of snowfencing, using steel poles with vertical wooden slats.

One of the temporary snow fences built last winter will also be fixed.

And skirting will be removed from seven residential units under the plan. That’s because without skirting, some snow could blow beneath the buildings, rather than pile up into drifts.

The owners of these homes have not yet been consulted, said Bertol.

The approved spending is just part of a larger plan proposed by the consultants. The final proposed fence, if built, would cost $2 million and stretch across 915 metres.

Before the motion passed, Coun. Therese Rodrigue asked Bertol what reassurances council would have the fences would solve the problem of homes in the nearby subdivision being buried by snowdrifts.

“This is a lot of money for an experiment. What guarantee do we have that this will substantially help?” asked Coun. Therese Rodrigue.

Bertol replied there’s no guarantee, but the consultants have spent 20 years completing snow studies around the region.

“They intimately know the snow conditions of the Baffin region,” said Bertol.

The consultants visited Iqaluit twice, once in the dead of winter, and once not long ago, to take measurements of the ground, said Bertol.