How to develop Arctic water resiliency without spending money

By Ron Kent, Founding Father of the NTWWA and Former Executive Director of the Association

Resiliency is a newer industry watchword that is used to guide engineers and developers in the design of infrastructure that can withstand hardship and, if damaged, can be quickly returned to service.

It’s expensive. This was talked about at a macro level in the 2018 Journal. But now, recent events have highlighted the strains on, and the fragility of, our infrastructure. As seen in the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as during natural hazards and extreme weather events, infrastructure systems (such as health, power, water and sanitation, transport, and telecommunications) are particularly vulnerable. This is because they are often organized as networks through which even small local problems multiply quickly. Disruptions to infrastructure magnify chronic infrastructure challenges such as underfunding and poor maintenance and mismanagement, which have resulted in poor water quality and sanitation systems and transport networks and unreliable electricity grids.

That is quite a lot. But what does it mean for our northern communities? Can we, somehow, protect our existing infrastructure without spending much, or really any, money? How can make our infrastructure, or at least our services, resilient (durable and flexible) by taking advantage of the things that we have already? What if we look somewhere else for some inspiration?

But before we do that, I want to remind everyone that the NTWWA was started 27 years ago with the confident, and maybe even arrogant, idea that we have ourselves and we can teach ourselves. Is it that long ago? Wow! Talk about confidence and durability! Anyway, look at any of the conference agendas and see how many Northerners there are making presentations and teaching. Yes, we can, can’t we?

Dr Kenneth Ginsburg, a children’s doctor, and human development expert, proposes that there are seven essential and interrelated components that make up being resilient – competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping and control. Let’s look at these.

Nope. Changed my mind.

In writing this piece, I began by defining each of these components from a Northern perspective. But as I babbled on and on, I realized that any Northerner who simply reads the list wouldn’t need to be reminded of what holds communities and people together because you live like that every single day. These are the things taught to all of us by our elders.

So, I stopped and thought that we should just get on with it, right? That’s the way we do things. Something needs to be done, so we do it.

What we need is: an inventory of the assets and infrastructure we have and a list of the worst things that could happen; and a plan for how we can continue to provide services before a replacement item can be delivered or built.

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Can we look at Iqaluit for a moment? Who would have ever guessed there would be fuel contamination in the drinking water – for months? Maybe that should be on our list, too.

Okay. Now we have our inventory and our worst-case list. Let’s look at that list. Some of these things we can’t do anything about. But just because the fire hall burned down doesn’t mean we don’t need firefighting services. How can we do that? How did we do that before we got the fancy fire hall and the fire truck (that was lost in the blaze) and the ribbon cutting ceremony? Can we fight fires again like we did before we got the new firetruck? What do we have to do to make that way of doing things work again?

Starting with this example, perhaps the first thing we need is community awareness and fire prevention training. The volunteer firefighters could offer to check people’s homes for areas of danger, and they could go through the community buildings looking for dangerous “hot spots”.

Next, despite the awareness and prevention efforts, there could still be another fire. Can we use the water trucks to fight the fires? Do we even have enough hoses? Can we borrow some hoses from somewhere until new the hoses come in?

So, you see how this goes. What is great about it is that people all get together to come up with ideas that will work and be accepted in the community. Not that the official who came into the community to investigate can’t help (maybe they can help with some new hoses), but that wouldn’t be a solution developed by the community and be especially what your community needs.

Before I finish this article, and because it is for the NTWWA’s Journal, I want to return to something from the earlier information. Disruptions to infrastructure increase the challenges caused by chronic underfunding, poor maintenance, and mismanagement, all of which result in poor water quality and sanitation systems. We may not be able to do much about underfunding, but we can do something about poor maintenance and mismanagement. Yes, we can form an organization like the NTWWA.

What?! Okay, you caught me. I am bringing the whole argument around to the beginnings of the NTWWA itself. We have ourselves and we can teach ourselves. So, yes, we can. Let’s get ourselves prepared for the worst that may never happen. But if it does, we are ready. S

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