Why you can’t drink the water in Iqaluit right now

Jordan It’s not a secret, actually, it’s a very visible and shameful fact that in remote regions of this country, regions that are almost exclusively inhabited by Indigenous people, clean water can be frustratingly hard to come by. A rhetorical question is often rightly asked when this happens. If one of Canada’s prominent cities was on a boil water advisory or had undrinkable water, how quickly would that be fixed? Well, right now, a territorial capital is finding out.

News Anchor With no drinkable tap water across Iqaluit, residents like Connie Naulaq are scared.

Connie Naulaq clip The fact that this happened here in Iqaluit, in a major city in Canada in 2021, is very disturbing.

Jordan Earlier this month, Iqualuit residents noticed something funny with their water. It smelled like gas. Last week, they were told not to drink it, not just boil the water first, don’t drink it, period. And now the city and in fact, every level of government is scrambling to find out what happened. And, more importantly, how to fix it. Beyond that, though, this raises logistical questions. How do you supply enough clean water to a remote city of 10,000 people? How vulnerable is infrastructure in the farthest Northern reaches of Canada? And is this fundamentally different from the neglect that sees boil water advisories remain for years on Indigenous land? Or is this just a matter of visibility?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Kent Driscoll is a reporter and video journalist for APTN in Iqaluit. How’s it going, Kent?

Kent Not so bad, Jordan. It’s a nice Gray day here in a Iqaluit. Seasonable weather. If it wasn’t for the water, things would be fantastic.

Jordan Well, let’s start right there. When did people up there begin to realize that something was off with the water?

Kent Back on October 2, some people in various parts of Iqaluit, and there was no rhyme or reason to it, started reporting a gassy smell in their water. The city started testing back on October 4, and the immediate response was, ‘Well, we’re testing and we are not coming up positive for anything’. Thing was, they were testing for mostly biological contaminants, the sort of thing you would usually find in bad drinking water. They weren’t testing for Petroleum hydrocarbons. So a week ago, day after Thanksgiving, they get into one of the water tanks next to the reservoir, and it was one of the sealed ones. It goes from the reservoir right to this tank. They opened the tank and it reeked of gas. And that day, 3:30 in the afternoon, the Mayor got up and said, don’t use the water. And they made an official announcement at 06:00 that night. So that’s basically the timeline.

Jordan So that was last Tuesday. So this has been going on for a week now?

Kent It’s been a week. Yeah.

Jordan I know you mentioned it smelled of gas. Before the city said, don’t drink it, were people drinking it? Have you seen any of it or smelled it?

Kent At our place we were smelling a chlorine smell for a couple of days when it was in question. But the city treats water with chlorine, and that didn’t seem really abnormal to us. Now, other parts of town, and again, when I say it doesn’t have any rhyme or reason, some people are on truck water some are on city water that comes directly in a pipe to your house, and some were reporting gas, some weren’t. But there was enough people out there saying, ‘no, you’ve tested, I still smell gas’ that they kept going forward and eventually discovered the problem.

Jordan So how dangerous is it to have consumed this stuff? I assume at least slightly, or they wouldn’t say, stop drinking the water. But what do we know about the risk here?

Kent Well, we’re told we’re not at risk for when we were drinking the water before they put in that don’t drink the water order. And they brought out Dr. Mike Patterson, the chief public health officer here in the territory, when the city did their news conference last Friday, and they brought him out to assure everyone that the water was okay. And Mike has built up a lot of goodwill. He’s been our chief public health officer all the way through the Covid-19 crisis. So if Mike is out there saying you’re not poisoned, just don’t drink it anymore, that’s somewhat comforting.

But the biggest thing is they still haven’t told us how poison it was. The number I’m after is parts per million. And Health Canada hasn’t given me that number. The government of Nunavut hasn’t given me that number. The city of Iqaluit won’t give me that number. So trying to figure out how poisoned we were is a big thing. And the initial warning that went out was scary as hell. It said, not only is the water so bad, you can’t drink it, pregnant women and newborns shouldn’t even bathe in it. And we’re a hub community where if a baby is born on Baffin island, the mother’s flown to Iqaluit a month before. So we’re the baby capital of the territory. So that was terrifying. They later pulled that back and said that pregnant women and newborns can bathe now. But that’s just a sign of how serious they thought it was. And we still don’t have hard numbers.

Jordan And when you don’t have those hard numbers and none of the levels of government will give them to you, and you kind of see the order pushed out and then pulled back a little bit, at least, what kind of trust does that engender among the population to the people who are supposedly dealing with this?

Kent Yeah, there’s been a lot of backlash, especially against city hall. And the other thing that came out throughout all this, turns out we haven’t had a director of public works for the last 15 months. The CAO has been having the water guy report directly to her because they simply couldn’t fill the position. So there’s always fear of the infrastructure here in Iqaluit, no matter what infrastructure it is. I’m still afraid of the water. To be honest, I don’t think it’s right yet. And we’ll have to see. They’re saying at least this week, maybe next we might be able to check the taps again.

Jordan Do we know what caused this?

Kent That’s interesting. Yes and no. The way I’ve been putting it when asked, is if we were playing clue here, I don’t have an answer yet, but I’ve got a lot of X’s on my card. The water plant in question is right next to the reservoir, which is also next to a power plant. What they know for sure is that the contamination came in through one sealed tank. They’re draining that tank and they’re getting into it, and what the city figures and what their consultants figure is that there was a crack in that tank and somehow fuel got forced up through the land, in through that crack into the water.

So was that fuel forced because there was an accident there prior because the power plants next door? We don’t know that. Was it because climate change is heating the tundra and pushing up gas? We don’t know. All we know is most likely something got in from the ground into the water. So they’re investigating all around that area. But I mean, the power plant and the water have both been there since the 1960s, it’s the most likely place to look.

Jordan In the meantime, though, you mentioned that it’s been a week. It might be up to another week. How have residents been coping? This is a remote, as you know well, it’s pretty remote. You mentioned before we talked that they just flew in an Airbus full of water.

Kent Yeah, they brought in this morning, Arctic Co-ops got behind it. All the plane spotters were out on the runway early this morning. Airbus A330, 100,000 pounds of water. But as far as how Iqaluit residents are dealing with it, it’s funny, last week, when I was doing one of my stories for this, I did a whole section where I go, well, Iqaluit residents have faced a lot. We can handle arson to major infrastructure. We can handle winds that blow the roofs off of buildings. We can handle the dump burning for a month. And my producer goes, do you have cover vis for all of those comments? You have video to put with it? And I go, Mark, not only do I have cover vis, I have cover vis from a three month period in 2018. This is a town that is familiar with crisis. If I was going to be anywhere to go through this, I’ll go with Iqaluit, we’re practiced.

Jordan What do you do then? How do you band together and what kind of systems have been set up?

Kent So what the city has done is we have a river that’s basically on the other side of town of this reservoir, Sylvia Grinnell River. And the elders and many Inuit prefer the water from there. So people have been going out and filling up, basically, whatever will hold water. The city has also been running the water trucks out there, filling the water trucks up and dispensing them here in Iqaluit. Now, the city says you’re supposed to boil that water for a minute before drinking it. I’ve had water right out of that river. That’s decent water.

Aside from that, between the city and the government of Nunavut, there’s been 270,000 litres of bottled water flown in as of yesterday. Two of the mines, the Agnico Eagle Mine, over in the Kivalliq region, and the Baffin Island Ore mine, each sent 15-20,000 liters of bottled water. Because remote mining operations, they’ve got a lot of bottled water. So they ship some of that in. And we’ve got all sorts of organizations in town bringing water. The QIA, the regional Inuit Association just brought in 30,000 liters, but they’ve designated theirs specifically for elders and people who can’t make it to the water distribution areas. So we’re getting through it the way we always get through it. Everyone is chipping in in their own way.

Jordan So that’s individuals and what it looks like for households and just getting water to go about your day, what kind of impact does this have on the institutions and the infrastructure? I’m thinking, I guess, of schools and hospitals and things like that that need mass quantities of reliable water.

Kent The schools were closed for a couple of days and they’ve managed to reopen on bottled water. Now the hospital is interesting. Again. I mentioned Dr. Patterson was up giving the press conference on behalf of the city, answering the medical questions. And they were asking him what processes at the hospital are impacted. And this one blew my mind. The autoclave that they used to sterilize instruments. They weren’t sure if they could run it because it creates steam at such a high heat. If there’s fuel in the water, it could explode. So they’ve been flying instruments south to be sterilized and using disposable ones, but it’s definitely impacted surgery schedules here at the hospital for sure.

Jordan How are they looking at trying to fix this? What needs to be done? What are the challenges?

Kent Buckets of money and political will. Right now, they’re not asking the federal government for anything specific except for a water permit to draw water from that other river, which they went ahead and gave right away. The long term and eventual fix is that we have a long term water infrastructure problem here. It has been since I got here, and our water problems are long term and it affects everything. We have a huge housing problem. Well, you can’t build any more houses until you can put them on the water, and you can’t put them on the water until we fix the water problem. So literally hundreds of millions of dollars could be spent on the water here just to bring it up to a Southern standard.

Jordan Well, you mentioned earlier that you learned through this saga that there was nobody overseeing public works. And I just wonder what else a crisis like this can reveal about what’s working and what’s not working in a place like Iqaluit.

Kent What’s working is the community. Here’s another example of how the community came together. We have a territorial election going on right now, and half the candidates in Iqaluit just shut down their campaigns and started hauling water to homes. It’s stuff like that. It’s our local food center teaming up with the Inuit organization to deliver water to elders. It’s that sort of community innovation that’s going to get us through it because that’s what always gets us through it.

Jordan I want to ask you a question. I’m going to try to put it delicately, but I think it’s something that’s probably occurred to me and other people reading about this from afar is, how different is this incident from the boil water advisories that we have seen linger for years on Indigenous land around the country? Is there a fundamental difference here in the way that government has responded, or is it just a matter of scale?

Kent Scale has a lot to do with it. The fact that we’re a territorial capital. The fact, and it’s funny with the government response, I’ve been critical of the government in Nunavut in the past because of our consensus system. Usually when you flip governments, you fire all the deputy ministers and bring in new ones. That doesn’t happen here. The Minister changes and we still get all the deputy ministers. So I’ve often complained that a lot of power in Nunavut goes to those deputy ministers. Luckily for us, all those deputy ministers live in Iqaluit. So if there’s a problem in Iqaluit that’s affecting those people in their everyday life, odds are it’s going to the top of the list.

Boiled water orders is such a large term. We’ve been on boil water orders here in Iqaluit before, but that’s just from turbidity, when they’re working on the pipes and something might get riled up, the water might be cloudy. They’ll tell you to boil it for a few days. A boil water order, that’s a pain in the butt, but it’s livable. This is a don’t drink the water. You can boil that water all day and it’s still not safe to drink. And that’s another level. So I think my understanding of it, the reserves that are on a boil water and a don’t drink. Those are two different levels of priority. And I don’t think that’s separated in the minds of the public yet.

Jordan What do you think will be the lingering result of this period? Of the whole two weeks, maybe when it’s all said and done in Iqaluit, you kind of mentioned that we’re not sure how poisoned the water was. And does that create some lingering distrust with the people in charge or is this and you’ve illustrated it very well, another thing that a town that knows how to handle this kind of thing gets through and gets over?

Kent I don’t have a lot of faith that this is going to be fixed long term, like this individual problem. That tank? Sure. But the water problem in general is larger than I think there’s a political will to deal with. The city doesn’t have enough money to do it. The government of Nunavut’s got 25 communities to look out for. I don’t have a lot of faith in this being resolved in any timely way. And then when it is resolved, my biggest concern and this is what happens all the time in the north. Temporary fixes become permanent solutions. They might be able to slap something together to bypass that tank, but that’s not an answer. That’s a stop gap, and we end up with that all the time. Stop gaps that end up being permanent.

Jordan Kent, I hope that you get a permanent solution to this. At the very least, I hope you get your water back on quickly. Thank you for this.

Kent Thank you. Appreciate it.

Jordan Kent Driscoll of APTN.

That was The Big Story. If you want more, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca, find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN and talk to us anytime via email at thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!].

Speaking of which, I want to answer a couple of emails that we’ve gotten from listeners, specifically emails wondering about the advertisements on this show, the good news story and the War of the Worlds alien questions. listeners wrote in wondering if the advertisers on our show had written those questions for me or had picked the stories that we tell during our good news segments. I want to tell you that the answer to that is absolutely no. We have those sponsors bring you content that we think you’ll want to hear.

Myself, Stefanie Phillips and Joseph Fish find the good news stories. I write the scripts just like I do for the intro. I read them because I think they are more fun for you and for me, than me reciting 60 seconds of scripted advertising. As for the War of the Worlds, the same thing applies with the added caveat that, as I hope was evident, I really enjoy talking about aliens. And if a company me is willing to sponsor me doing it and keep the show going, we will welcome them with open arms.

Thanks so much for listening, and as always, thank you for your feedback. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings we’ll talk tomorrow.

Back to top of page