The Cold and the Old - 35 Years of Design

The Cold and the Old – 35 Years of Design in the Far North Kenneth Johnson Most adults, with the exception of the Dr. Sheldon Cooper, do not have a catch phrase such as “bazinga.” By chance I had one presented to me several years ago. A colleague and I were discussing my work in the far north, and my interest in northern history, and he blurted out the phrase “the cold and the old.” It neatly sums up my personal and professional interests.

My first trip to the Canadian Arctic was in the fall of 1980, as part of an undergraduate engineering course at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The destination was the aboriginal community of Lower Post near Watson Lake, Yukon, and our project was to develop housing and infrastructure alternatives for the community. What I saw there shaped my view of northern infrastructure.

The state of the housing in the community was poor. The ceiling in one of the homes we visited was on the verge of collapse due to rot from inadequate vapour barriers. There were some new homes in Lower Post—bright, roomy, log cabins with high ceilings. But no one was living in them.

It took me almost a decade to understand and explain this situation.

Meanwhile, we submitted our report and passed the course. The following spring, our findings were presented to a group of residents from Lower Post who came down to UBC. After graduation in May of ’81, I began my career as a “southern” engineer, with no expectations at the time of returning to the North.

Six years later, life steered me north again. In 1987 I took a permanent position with the Government of the Northwest Territories in Yellowknife. With a graduate degree in environmental engineering acquired a few years after my undergrad degree, my education was a good fit with the water and sanitation mandates of my new job.

Once again, work in the North was eye-opening. I began to answer my years-old questions from Lower Post.

The engineering conditions for water and sanitation engineering "North of 60" present unique and extreme design challenges. What ground is not gripped by permafrost will experience frost that penetrates at least three metres into the earth over the course of the winter. Material supply and delivery is very often controlled by the opportunity window of either an ice road or sealift, depending upon the location of the project. Construction is also controlled by the very short opportunity window called summer (June through September).

But for decades, “southern” engineers had been delivering designs to northern communities similar to what worked in the warmer parts of the country. By ignoring the unique character of the North, they were compromising the success of their projects.

One of the legendary failures in wastewater management in northern communities was macerator stations (large grinding facilities) for bagged sewage. Prior to the 1980s Northern communities commonly collected sewage in bags that were taken to the dump. Since plastic bags generally do not decompose, a messy sewage problem was developing. Macerator plants were supposed to grind up these bags and allow the sewage to decompose outside the bags.

Macerators are often used to grind sewage in “southern” Canada. But the sewage is not bagged like it is in the north. After six macerators were built across the Northwest Territories, a problem was discovered. The bags were considerably stronger than the shredding mechanism in the macerators. The macerators continually jammed, making the process completely ineffective. Needless to say, the initiative came to a “grinding” halt.

Oversights like these are why no one lived in the new houses in Lower Post. I never found out specifically why no one was living in the new houses. It could have been a dozen different things, all variations on the theme of an “off the shelf” attempt at solving a northern design problem with decision-making that originated in Ottawa.

The silver lining to all of these challenges is that many hard lessons have been learned. Northern engineers, for the most part, now understand the challenges with the North and how to overcome them.

The cold and the old work hand-in-hand, with the “old” providing the lessons so that designing to accommodate the “cold” can be done much better.