Authorities managing the winter road north of Yellowknife said a stricken truck shown in viral photos this week did not go through the ice and nobody was hurt.
The incident occurred on Wednesday evening along the Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road connecting Yellowknife to the NWT’s three active diamond mines.
A tractor-trailer got into difficulty in the vicinity of Charlie’s Hill – an area of the road just south of Brown Lake in the direction of Gordon Lake, roughly a third of the way northeast from Yellowknife toward the road’s terminus near the Nunavut border.
Winter road operations director Barry Henkel said no fuel was spilled and nothing went through the ice during the incident.
Henkel said a crack had developed in the middle of that section. It eventually widened sufficiently to allow water up through the crack onto the top of the ice.
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The driver of the rig, seeing apparent open water in front of and beneath them, believed the situation to be more serious than it was and feared the truck going in, Henkel added. They requested help.
Photos of the incident shared hundreds of times online were interpreted by some people to show the truck having partly descended through ice. Henkel said those images in fact show the water that came up through the crack having frozen around the vehicle, with more than 120 cm of ice still remaining beneath the truck.
“We transferred the fuel out of that loaded truck onto an empty truck, then pulled that truck out of there,” Henkel told Cabin Radio on Friday.
“This doesn’t happen often,” he added.
“We’re repairing the area. It’ll be single-lane traffic for the next little while until the area gets totally repaired.
“The first and foremost thing for me is that people work safely, no fuel gets spilled, the environment is protected – and people are protected, above all.”
