Half-buried asbestos holds up gravel quarrying

JOHN THOMPSON

The City of Iqaluit and the federal government have cemented a deal for hauling gravel this season, but now there’s a new obstacle.

Contractors won’t be able to haul gravel from the pit until several bags of asbestos are safely re-buried.

The only source of gravel for the city is North 40, which also happens to be a contaminated site. Inside the former metal dump are hundreds of bags of asbestos, buried beneath a blue tarp and capped with dirt.

Last Friday morning, Workers Compensation Board staff noticed that the tarp had torn, exposing four to five bags of asbestos. They’ve since ordered the city to rebury the bags.

That’s likely a small job, but it requires special suits and breathing equipment, and city council has vowed its staff won’t touch the stuff, or pay anyone else to touch it.

Until someone buries the asbestos, the quarry will remain closed.

Last fall city council passed a resolution not to spend any money on environmental cleanup in North 40, after the city paid $37,000 during the summer to safely cover the asbestos.

“Why does it automatically come back to the city?” asked Deputy Mayor Glenn Williams, during a meeting with city staff, government officials and contractors, organized by the Iqaluit Chamber of Commerce last Friday.

Williams said whoever put the asbestos in the dump should pay for their removal. He said he believed the asbestos came from the clean-up of Upper Base conducted by the federal government in the mid-1990s.

“It came from Upper Base, and it was bagged and it was put in the metal dump. It wouldn’t be that hard to find out who did it,” Williams said.

But when Williams asked if Indian and Northern Affairs Canada knew who put the asbestos in the dump, INAC’s Bernie MacIsaac only silently shook his head.

The question of who owns North 40 has been disputed for many years by the city, the Government of Nunavut and the federal government, perhaps because no one wants to pay the eventual cost of an expensive clean-up.

Meanwhile, contractors have warned that up to $70 million in construction work is at risk this summer, unless the gravel pit opens soon.

At the meeting, Qikiqtaaluk Corp. President Brian McLeod warned a jurisdictional dispute shouldn’t let construction grind to a halt.

“That’s beyond anything we can solve right now,” Macleod said.

“It’s a five-by-five piece of plastic we’re dealing with. It’s not nuclear waste,” he said.

By the meeting’s end, the only proposed solution was to ask the one party not present pay the bill: the Government of Nunavut.

When the gravel pit opens, contractors who quarry the site will be responsible for testing to see if gravel they use is contaminated. In the last two years gravel has been removed from North 40, all tests have come back clean, said Geoff Baker, the city’s manager of engineering services.