Lynn Lau
Northern News Services

Tuktoyaktuk (Jan 28/02) - Police officers, taxi drivers and everyday citizens will soon be able to do what people in larger centres take for granted -- look up street addresses on a map.

A multi-year project to provide proper street addresses to every location in town will soon culminate in the numbering of individual households.

It's all thanks to a donation from the Tuktoyaktuk Development Corporation. The money will allow distribution of reflective street numbers starting in February.

"We didn't have any sequential numbers before," explains economic development officer Tonya Skanes. "I'm 50-057, but it doesn't relate to the lot or plan number."

Houses built for public housing have their own numbers, but private homes usually don't. Without a standard address system, police used the public housing numbers, plus numbers they assigned themselves to the other houses.

"It was a very difficult system," says RCMP Const. Chris Self. "Usually it's like -- we're near the boat, or under the hill or something like that to help us out. (Callers) being able to give us a street name and number, it's going to ease the transition for new members and decrease our response time."

Coun. Merven Gruben says he hopes the street numbers are of more help to people than the all-Inuvialuktun street names that were assigned last fall.

He says the committee planned to use bilingual street names but when the signs were erected last fall, the English wasn't there. Gruben says he still doesn't know his own street name because he can hardly pronounce it.

"There's a lot of the public saying it would be nice if it was in English also. Everybody knows Beaufort Drive -- that's the main drag in town."