Guy Quenneville
Northern News Services
Wednesday, July 18, 2007

YELLOWKNIFE - The city fire department has upgraded the public safety message sign at the end of its lawn facing Franklin Avenue in a big way.

"It was a sign installed probably in 1990," said deputy Fire Chief Chucker Dewar.

"It was an older one that you actually had to insert the letters in. The firefighters had to go out there physically and put in the different messages. It's labour intensive. And in 40 below weather, it's not very comfortable, either."

The old sign began to show its age, too.

"It started to break down," said Dewar. "Pieces were breaking off. The plastic started to crack. It was hard to get replacements."

All of which prompted the fire department to upgrade to a new sign. Dewar said the plan was to partner up with a couple of local businesses, but a generous offer from the Ekati Diamond Mine proved too good to refuse. The mine offered to pay entirely for the new electronic sign, which cost approximately $25,000.

"We wanted to go to the full-blown colour thing," said Dewar. "This is the full meal deal. And I really didn't expect that they would sponsor the whole thing."

Deana Twissell, an Ekati external affairs officer, said the mine came on board because it liked what the fire department had done with the previous sign, despite its physical shortcomings.

"For years, I've driven by that manual sign, which always had a good, short, to-the-point safety message - little reminders as people are quickly driving by," she said.

The fire department has returned its thanks to the mine by doing cross-training with the mine's emergency response team.

While the new sign is operational, there's still more work to be done, said Dewar.

"We need to get some feedback from people," he said. "We're also getting an engineer to assess how to better establish the sign out there because right now it's really not the best setup."

Once the department is completely comfortable with the sign, it will invite other community agencies like the RCMP and Stanton Territorial Hospital to use the sign, too.