Contractor in Enterprise, N.W.T., questions cost, necessity of shipping wildfire waste to Alberta

A local subcontractor involved in cleaning up wildfire debris and waste in Enterprise, N.W.T., is questioning why the material had to be shipped out of the territory for disposal.

Contractors hauled over 3,000 tons of ash and debris from last year's devastating wildfire in Enterprise to High Level, Alta., nearly 300 kilometres away.

Mike Kimble, owner of Enterprise-based Key Contracting, says the territory could have saved time and public funds by dumping the waste at a facility in the territory.

After a wildfire tore through the South Slave hamlet in 2023, the N.W.T. government hired Colliers Project Leaders to lead the recovery and clean-up work. Colliers in turn contracted ARCAN Construction and ARCAN hired local company Key Contracting.

Kimble says his company cleaned up and sorted through the majority of the rubble but he said there was nowhere to dispose of it.

"They wouldn't let me put them in the dump, they wouldn't let me put them in the temporary site that we built … I said, 'Well what am I supposed to do with them?'" Kimble said.

He said that he was told the ash was contaminated and would have to be transported to a special facility for safe disposal  — something the territory doesn't have, according to the minister of Municipal and Community Affairs (MACA).

Kimble said no one could answer what the material was contaminated with, or who conducted the testing, and so he decided to take his own samples from three of the properties he cleared and sent them to ALS Environmental, a lab in Yellowknife, for testing.

A manager that oversees the waste management facility in High Level, saw the results of the testing and confirmed to CBC News that the samples were not contaminated.

"The pH level was a bit higher, but that is to be expected with any ash waste," said Jennifer Feenstra, in an email to CBC News.

Mike Kimble, owner of Key Contracting, says the work to clean up Enterprise was frustrating and inefficient. (Submitted by Mike Kimble)

Vince McKay, The N.W.T.'s minister of MACA, said the waste is hazardous, contaminated with lead and asbestos, possibly among other things.

He said he believes Colliers contracted a Yellowknife consulting company to complete "some" of that testing.

Colliers declined an interview and did not respond to questions about the waste. A representative said in an email that it could not comment on behalf of the Government of the Northwest Territories.

McKay says it's possible that Kimble collected samples from an area that wasn't contaminated and that the testing under Colliers collected multiple samples from each site.

Why not cut the contracting middle-men

Kimble says the clean-up work meant good money for his company, but through the multiple layers of contractors and subcontractors, he found the work to be inefficient and communication to be frustrating.

Kimble said his company "knew what had to be done," but said there were often frustrating delays in trying to get work approved by ARCAN and Colliers.

Kimble says his company did probably 90 per cent of the work and wonders why there had to be so many other intermediaries and why the cleanup contract was never put up for tender.

According to the MACA minister, the contract with Colliers was sole-sourced for speed.

"The tendering process is there for a reason obviously, and in a perfect world that would have been done, but at the end of the day we would have been waiting months to process it, to vet it, to make sure that it's screened properly and then go through that whole red tape if you will," said McKay.

"Enterprise would probably still be waiting to get that cleaned up."

Colliers' contract is to clean up wildfire debris and waste in Enterprise, Hay River and Behchokǫ̀. McKay said the government has so far paid just over $4 million for clean-up work in those three communities.

MACA said in an email that the cost of loading, hauling and disposing debris from those communities costs about $1.4 million total.

The department did not respond to questions about the cost to clean up Enterprise alone.