Igloolik still waiting on new fire truck

The sealifts have come and gone from Igloolik for the season, and none of them were carrying the new fire truck the hamlet was expecting.

However, Igloolik’s chief administrative officer says that may not be such a bad thing for now.

The 2022 schedule to replace fire trucks in Nunavut has been delayed a year due to pandemic-related manufacturing and supply chain issues, a Community and Government Services Department spokesperson said in an email to Nunatsiaq News.

Specifically, no suitable chassis were available for transportation, they said, meaning no trucks were purchased and delivered as part of the 2022 resupply.

The spokesperson said CGS plans to purchase two new trucks for the territory next year, if funding is approved, to offset this year’s delay.

Since fire trucks have to be delivered to communities as part of the sealift resupply, no new vehicles are expected to arrive until next fall at the earliest.

For Igloolik, not receiving a new fire truck this year means the hamlet will continue using its current truck, which CAO Greg Morash estimates is about 25 years old.

At some point this year, the truck will have to undergo repairs, he said.

However, by not getting a new truck the hamlet gets more time to resolve the issue of where to put it when it finally arrives.

In July, Morash told Nunatsiaq News that Igloolik is in “desperate” need of a new maintenance garage, which would provide a climate-controlled place to service all its heavy equipment and emergency vehicles.

The current garage isn’t large enough to house both the current fire truck and a new one, so receiving a new fire truck this fall would have required the hamlet to decommission the old one until a bigger garage could be built, Morash explained.

He hopes the new truck, when it finally arrives, will be bigger than the current truck as Igloolik’s population grows and more houses are built.

“You gotta go with the times, right?” Morash said.