As I alluded in one of my last posts, there is a Dead Dog Lake here in Arctic Bay. I'm not sure how it got its name, however there are clues in one of my favourite stories to tell from up here.
Dead Dog Lake is a small lake, perhaps a couple of acres in size, and it is found right above town, just as the road to Victor Bay crests the hill. When I first arrived in town, I noticed that there was a utilidor running from the town, below the Hamlet Office, up the hill to Dead Dog Lake. A small, clearly abandoned, shack stood on the shore where the pipes entered the water.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with a utilidor it is one of the two systems used to deliver water in the Arctic. You see, because of permafrost it is impractical to install a water main system underground here. In most places, like Arctic Bay, our water is delivered by truck. The water is trucked from a pump station and pumped in to tanks in every home. Sewage leaves the home via the same method (but not the same truck).
The other system is the utilidor system. It is essentially a water main system installed above ground in insulated pipes. Many times the pipes are enclosed in insulated boxes, but sometimes the pipes themselves are insulated. They are not usually heated, but rely on a steady flow of water and the insulation to keep them from freezing in our admittably long and cold winters. These pipes were of the insulated pipe design, two large (I'd guess the inside diameter to be six inches) pipes running parallel seemingly to nowhere.
Knowing that our water was delivered by truck I had to ask about the utilidor. I learned that indeed the plan had been to supply the water for homes from Dead Dog Lake to the homes in Arctic Bay by Utilidor. The main pipes for the system were installed and a pump house built on the shore. Presumably this was done at significant cost as no construction project is cheap in the Arctic.
It was at this point in time that someone decided that the water quality in the lake should be tested. Yep, Dead Dog Lake.
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I always wondered what all of those pipes were for …
.. and now you know, the rest of the story.