Crews are escorting supply trucks through the snowbound Inuvik-Tuk Highway as the road’s closure nears the two-week mark, the GNWT says.
Record snowfall left the 137-km highway between Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk impassable at the start of February. It hasn’t been open since February 2.
Workers helping to clear the road say they have been working around the clock at either end of the highway, shifting drifts that they describe as 10 feet high for kilometres.
Even so, the road remains closed because a wide-enough path hasn’t yet been cleared for regular traffic to resume.
On Wednesday afternoon, the NWT’s Department of Infrastructure acknowledged that “the closure has been longer than expected” and said the contractor hired to clear the highway was “focused on widening certain sections of the road.”
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Earlier this month, Mayor of Tuktoyaktuk Erwin Elias told Cabin Radio the community felt “abandoned” by the GNWT after the highway shut down. He expressed concern that Tuk could begin to run out of food and medical supplies with its only road south out of action.
Elias compared the vast amount of snow falling in the region with other weather events that have affected the NWT in recent months.
“This is not a flood, we’re not having fires here. We have snow that has definitely affected the highway to a point where it has directly affected us as well,” he said last week.
“Does snow count as a natural disaster, or is it different?”
On Wednesday, the Department of Infrastructure said “escorts are traversing the highway” to ensure goods arrive in Tuktoyaktuk.
The highway, opened in 2017, represents the northern extremity of Canada’s highway system, stretching to the Arctic coast.
