Climate change batters Inuit village
The fish changed colour. New bird species were spotted. Two bridges were wiped out by a once-in-a-lifetime flood that forced villagers to dump sewage into their pristine waters. The locals have a message for city-dwellers: This is what climate change looks like.
“Climate change is real,” says Ron Mongeau, the town manager of Pangnirtung, a postcard-pretty spot girded by mountains and glacial fjords. “It’s not happening tomorrow or next week. It’s happening here and it’s affecting the life of everybody in the Arctic – every day.” Climate scientists describe the Arctic as Ground Zero for rising global temperatures, with climate change being felt earlier and more dramatically here than most of the planet. The most severe example came a year ago, on June 8. Floods knocked out two bridges that separated the community from its garbage dump, sewage-treatment plant, and water station. Locals were forced to pump their waste into the sea for several days as they jury-rigged a dirt-and-rock replacement bridge. The town declared a 30-day state of emergency and the federal government later covered the lion’s share of an $8 million project that built a replacement bridge last October. Mongeau says a torrent of meltwater cascaded off the surrounding mountains in an unusually mild spring. He says it eroded the permafrost base of the bridges and destroyed them both. “We literally had a wall of water – between 12 to 15 feet high – coming down that river,” Mongeau said. “It’s unprecedented in the history of this community. The first thing we did is talk to the elders. Nobody has any experience with any event anywhere close to the (water) level that we saw.” …
