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Ingraham re-route plan crawls along

Terrence McEachern
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, August 25, 2010

SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - The territorial government still hasn't decided which way a bypass route will go around Giant Mine on the Ingraham Trail.

Three options for re-routing the road have been on display since the summer of 2007, but Kevin McLeod, director of highways for the Department of Transportation, said the government wants to take another crack at gauging public opinion before proceeding.

"We're going to go to a public consultation to lay out our detailed plans in the next month or so and we're interested in people's opinions on which route they think is the best," said McLeod.

Previous public consultations showed that the "public was sort of divided in the three routes," he said.

All three options are for 500 metre-wide corridors. The first is about seven kilometres in length and begins at Fred Henne Territorial Park and connects to the Ingraham Trail just before the Yellowknife River bridge. The second option is around four kilometres in length. It goes past the city's dump and veers off to the northwest, whereas the third and shortest option is three kilometres in length and is closer to the shore of Back Bay. It goes through land allotted to the NWT Mining Heritage Society's future museum site at the Giant Mine boat launch.

All three options lead back to the Ingraham Trail just before the Yellowknife Bridge. The cost estimates on these three options are $14 million, $11 million and $8 million, respectively.

The department has deemed the two-year construction project necessary in order to bypass clean-up work at Giant Mine, particularly the underground chambers full of deadly arsenic trioxide - a by-product from years of gold mining activity - some of which lie beneath the road bed.

Ryan Silke, director of the NWT Mining Heritage Society, said he doesn't support the third option that runs by the museum.

"At least (based) on the plans that we saw, the road would go directly through our buildings. So, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to us," he said.

"I can't really see any other way to make that road work aside from blasting right through that whole area ... I don't know exactly what they were thinking when they came up with that whole idea."

Silke said he's interested in attending the next public consultation when a date is set.

"If the road could stay where it is but be moved further toward the west, that would be great and ideal. We kind of like having the highway in that area because it brings traffic through," he said.

Kelly Cumming, executive secretary for Dettah band Chief Ed Sangris, did not want to comment on the proposed project because the band is having a separate consultation with the Department of Transportation before the public consultation. She said there wasn't a firm date set for the consultation, but said she figures it would be very soon. Sangris was unavailable for comment.

McLeod said the idea to re-route around Giant Mine has been around for about 20 years, but the department became involved in the past five years when the Giant Mine clean-up project began.

He said construction would have begun sooner but there was no pressing need to re-route around the mine because the highway was functioning well and the freezing of the arsenic chambers has yet to begin. Also, there were other budget priorities that needed to be addressed.

McLeod said the Department of Transportation would like to start construction next year, but the proposed route needs to be co-ordinated and timed with the Giant Mine Remediation Project, he said.

"Once they put this remediation plan in place, which are frozen ground cores and they have all the above-ground infrastructure, our highway goes right over the place where they want to put this stuff," he said.

"The current highway alignment has got to change because (the remediation) planning is using parts of the highway or very close to the highway within our right of way to put facilities," he said.

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