HAY RIVER
The town is planning to trap or shoot an unknown number of beavers causing problems along the lagoon road.

One dam - about 10 metres wide - built by the large rodents on the east side of the road has turned a ditch into a growing reservoir of standing water. The water is backing up past a turn in the road near the sewage lagoon and threatening to flood over the road.

On the other side of the road, there are at least three more dams in the drainage system from the lagoon.

"There have been a few issues in the past," said Mayor Brad Mapes. "I don't think it's ever been as bad as it's been this year. I think it's the first time it's been really extreme."

The beaver dams are definitely an issue with how the town manages the sewage treatment system, he said. "We need to find a solution for it."

The beaver dams are not actually in the lagoon itself but on the drainage system of treated water. That system runs several kilometres along the road until the water enters Great Slave Lake.

The town decided to trap or shoot the beavers after consulting with the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, said Mapes. "We just went off the recommendations from ENR."

Suzanne Boucher, a renewable resource officer with the department, has been consulting with the town on the problem over the past couple of weeks.

Boucher said it's unknown how many beavers are causing the problems for the road and the sewage lagoon drainage system.

"There's no way to tell exactly," she said. "If you were to go over there and look, you probably wouldn't even see. You'd see the dams."

Boucher said the ditch on the east side of the road contains runoff from the town, not from the sewage lagoon.

"So right now they're worried about the water kind of overflowing the road and washing out the road," she said.

The four dams in all will be dealt with soon, she said,

"What you do is, after you remove the beavers, you remove a bit of the dam and let the water flow through to see whether or not beavers will come back," said Boucher.

Other beavers may appear in a couple of hours or less, she said. "Because once they hear that water movement, they're going to want to come and fix it. So that's why if they do that you can sit there with a gun and shoot them."

If after a couple of days no beavers show up at a dam, it means all the animals have been removed from that area.

Boucher said the actual removal of beavers can be done by a town employee or a hired trapper, and she may offer advice and assistance, and help obtain the necessary permits for such wildlife removal.

"I'm just waiting for them to put a plan together and it sounds like we'll be getting it (this) week," she said of the town. "We'll kind of go from there."

It is unknown how many more beavers may be in the area further away from the road "because we can't access it right now because it's really wet," she said. "This is going to be something that ENR and the Town of Hay River will be working on to access ... An assessment needs to be done of which ones need to be removed and how many."

Mapes and Boucher believe people will understand why the beavers have to be killed.

"Trapping beaver is suitable," said the mayor. "Around our area it's always been something that's been done."

Boucher said there are no other options.

"It's just part of the natural cycle. It's not like we're going to be wasting it or anything like that," she said, adding she plans to keep the harvested beavers and use them for bait.

"There's always somebody that's not going to be happy no matter what you do," she said.

The ENR officer said the town has the right to remove beavers if they are impacting the municipality's property.

Boucher said when she heard the beavers were in the lagoon drainage system she wondered how they could live in such water.

She contacted an ENR biologist and was told the beavers live in clean water.

Boucher said that indicates the system Hay River uses to treat sewage is actually really good.

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