Jeff Colbourne
Northern News Services

NNSL (Jul 08/98) - A contractor building a sun deck on a home on Wilkinson Drive found a nearby rock with a hole filled with explosives on the weekend.

Keeping as low key as possible, RCMP evacuated the surrounding residences. It took the Yellowknife fire department and explosives expert Gary Fandrick five hours to remove the device and diffuse a potentially dangerous situation.

"We were called in to flood the hole with what's called a piercing nozzle, dilute the explosives and float them out," said deputy fire chief Mike Lowing.

The fire department believes that the explosives was left behind by a previous residential developer about five or six years ago.

"Explosives, while very stable, do have inherent risks. There was a combination of explosives in the hole and anybody could have come alone with a hammer or a rock and connected it up. It could have been a child, it could have been anybody and the results would have been very substantial," said Lowing. "As far as how much explosives, we're not entirely sure because some of it may have been diluted out over the years."

Lowing said he anticipates that Mining Inspection Services with the Workers Compensation Board will investigate the incident. MIS is in charge of issuing all explosive licences and investigating all explosive incidents in the city.

Silvester Wong, chief inspector of mining with MIS, said that they may have an inspector go out to the site to make sure things are safe at the residence.

"We'll see what inspector finds out because we were not notified over the weekend. We just heard of this from the city this morning," said Wong on Monday.