Canada’s ice roads imperiled by thaw
ON THE TLICHO WINTER ROAD, Northwest Territories — In Canada’s northern latitudes, the frigid winter means freedom.
That is when lakes and rivers freeze into pavements of marbled blue ice. For a few months, trucks can haul fuel or lumber or diamonds or a moose carcass to the region’s remote communities and mines that are cut off by water and wilderness, reachable for most of the year only by barge or by air.
But Canada’s ice roads — more than 3,300 miles of them — have been freezing later and melting earlier, drastically reducing the precious window of time that isolated residents rely on to restock a year’s worth of vital supplies, or to simply take a road trip.
Even in the depths of winter, increasingly frequent storms and thawing have made the roads more dangerous and sometimes too weak to use safely, prompting authorities to close them for days at a time.
“It’s taking longer for everything to freeze up, and the ice isn’t as thick,” said Wally Schumann, the minister of infrastructure for the Northwest Territories. “Ice roads are the lifeline of our communities, and now they’re at risk.”
Schumann said climate change is to blame for the troubles with the ice roads, which are built anew each
year by hardy crews using heavy-duty plows, radar and water sprays to add layers of smooth ice that can support even the weight of a tractor-trailer full of mining equipment.
The roads are meant to last from January through April, but much of this year’s network already is unusable. As the ice roads have become increasingly unreliable, pressure has grown for Canada to prepare for a future without them, by building all-season land roads — a time-consuming and expensive job, estimated at 600,000 Canadian dollars, or about $450,000 per mile, maintenance not included.
“A lot of people say we’re out of time, we have to deal with this right now,” Schumann said.
For the people in the far north who wait anxiously each winter for the ice roads to reach their marooned communities, the crisis is becoming a matter of life and death.
“These roads are the only way our people can survive,” said Alvin Fiddler, grand chief of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation, which represents 49 indigenous communities in northern Ontario, including 32 that are isolated from Canada’s highway network and electrical grid and depend on the winter road system to replenish stocks of fuel, food and building materials.
In the vast boreal forests and tundra of the Northwest Territories, the federal and territorial governments are spending about $225 million to build a 93-mile, all-season highway to a small Inuit village on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, replacing an ice road. It is due to open in November, with several similar projects in the planning stages.
But that still leaves 10 of the territory’s remote communities dependent on winter roads and ice bridges across lakes, rivers and permafrost, delicate ground that has been frozen for thousands of years.
Michael Conway supervises ice-road crews in the North Slave region. A generation ago, he said, the lake would naturally freeze thick enough for crews to drive a plow across it without concern. But in recent years, the warmer autumns and deeper snow, which acts as an insulator, have made for much thinner natural lake ice, making road construction a cautious slog and delaying openings to traffic.
With a harrowing winter coming to an end, ice-road truckers are wondering how many more years they will be able to stay above water.
“This has been one of most difficult and challenging seasons we’ve ever faced,” said Mark Kohaykewych, president of Polar Industries, whose fleet of 42 trucks hauls freight across northern Manitoba, Ontario and Alberta. About three-quarters of those journeys are on winter roads, he said.
Kohaykewych has been in the ice-road trucking business for eight years, but only in the last two has he had to divert winter cargoes to airports because of unseasonable weather. Freak rainstorms made several ice roads unusable for a while in February, he said, and he spent the first weekend in April rescuing a stranded trucker’s rig that had broken through lake ice.
But at least the truckers can drive away. “The communities are the ones really suffering,” he said. “Without ice roads, how will they fix homes or build schools? You can’t fly in a bulldozer.”