Inuit village in Quebec’s Far North facing ‘severe’ water distribution challenges

MONTREAL — Officials in Quebec’s Nunavik region are raising the alarm over water shortages in the Inuit community of Puvirnituq, where a frozen pipe and persistent blizzards have left residents without consistent water deliveries for nearly two months.

The Kativik Regional Government says the village’s five-kilometre-long water pipeline froze during a blizzard in mid-March and has yet to thaw.

As a result, the town of roughly 2,100 people has been forced to bring in water by truck in extreme weather on icy, snowy roads.

Hossein Shafeghati, the Kativik Regional Government’s director of municipal public works, says persistent bad weather has left the trucks struggling through slush and snowdrifts to make deliveries.

“In the past three weeks – and this might be a little bit of an exaggeration – my colleagues who are there are telling me that they have had a blizzard every two days,” he said. “So the situation of the snow on the ground, which is a lot of slush right now, has made the movement of trucks very difficult.”

He said the regional government has marshalled as many resources as possible to help clear the roads and shovel out the access points to deliver water, which in some cases are under two metres of snow. And with more snowfall in the weekend forecast, “there are a couple of hard weeks to go through,” he said.

The ordeal has essentially “paralyzed” the village, he said. While he doesn’t know exactly how long people have gone without water deliveries, he believes it’s for days at a time.

“Water is the most important thing,” he said. “When we say water, it’s for drinking, for cooking, for washing, for flushing the toilets, for everything.”

He said interruptions that last longer than a few days “make life unbearable” and lead to physical illnesses and mental health problems. He said the local school has been forced to close at least once, and even the hospital has been affected.

In a statement, Kativik said the community “continues to face severe water distribution challenges.”

It said it’s hoping the weather will improve enough for interim repairs to take place in June and for normal operations to resume during the summer.

In the meantime, the water is loaded into trucks at a pumping station and disinfected manually with chlorine.

Shafeghati said the interim repair consists of building a new section of pipe to bypass the frozen one while it’s thawed out. Longer term solutions aren’t as simple, he said.

Shafeghati said Puvirnituq is one of three communities that is currently dealing with a frozen pipe, but the other two are smaller and more manageable.

While nothing can be done about the weather, he said upgraded infrastructure would help prevent problems. But only if governments invested at a far higher level than they currently do.

Another persistent issue is the lack of a skilled workforce to operate and maintain the equipment, which he said is a challenge with a very young population where many people are under 18.

Those who want to become mechanics, heavy equipment operators or technicians have to travel to distant parts of the province for schooling that is not always adapted to Indigenous realities, he said.

“It will be a long while, because the nature of the problems are very complex,” he said. “It may take another generation to make it sustainable.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 14, 2025.

Morgan Lowrie, The Canadian Press