World's most northern settlement: Alert, Nunavut aka "The top of the world"

[Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] it is a beautiful day in Nunavut and today I am in alert it is cold today it's about -32 Celsius which is this much Fahrenheit I've had the amazing opportunity to come up here twice now the first time I came out there was no sun at all you wouldn't believe it but it is one o'clock in the afternoon and this time I had the Lucky Fortune of getting to watch the sun rise for the very first time this year [Music] thank you [Music] thank you foreign [Music] at 82 degrees north alert is the world's northernmost permanently inhabited settlement in the world it is not a town despite what Google may tell you and it is also not the northernmost station in the world behind me about 800 kilometers is the North Pole and there is a station there however it's not permanently occupied in fact it's only occupied for I think a month of the year because of the conditions up there however since 1950s alert has had a permanent population a rotation of Staff starting with Environment Canada followed soon after by the military and then civilians like myself who you know continue to keep this place running and growing and doing its job time for a quick tour this is the habitation building this is where we live and spend our time when we're not working not surprisingly there's a trading post where you can buy anything you forgot to bring up or even get souvenirs to send home like these cute stuffies that my nieces and nephews are hopefully appreciating because there are several organizations that use the station it's evolved over time to fit the needs of many people and the rotation of new and returning staff also bring their own ideas for making the place a comfy home so there's always something to do like coffee clubs hobby clubs and Game Nights there's even a cinema where we have movie Nights a barber shop that I have clearly never been to and a PC game room [Music] there are tons of hangout spots in this deceptively large building there are two bars a chapel a computer room and two impressive huge fully equipped gyms [Music] and then there's my favorite part free-flowing coffee 24 7 y'all this is a typical room here an alert um for now anyways we got big storage [Music] and a bed and a chair Island sink TV workstation yeah it's nothing fancy but you know so checking the polar bear status is like checking the weather remember they were here first and since humans aren't polar bears capable of handling Arctic weather we're all assigned these massive snow suits to keep us safe and being a good Canadian boy I knew to go to the bathroom before putting this thing on being outside in the Arctic is one of the most Serene experiences it's so quiet and peaceful in fact one of the mottos up here is to embrace the piece which I luckily got to do every day [Music] foreign [Music] just how this place runs being so isolated and so far away from everything else it is a bit of a challenge to keep the lights on and the Heat Going requires teams of people and continuous Supply I'm going to show you a little bit of how that works because that's what I got brought up here to do and you know why not share what I know for it all to work because it is not connected by any roads as you might imagine there needs to be a continuous Supply brought in and that all comes from here it's all by plane everything gets brought in by plane Vehicles materials food fuel all of that and from there it gets distributed and used and whatever's not consumed gets sent back to be safely disposed of nothing gets buried here it is very environmentally conscious because the tundra is such a delicate ecosystem and that leads me into part of my job I'm brought up here as a bulk fuel technician which means I take care of all of the fuel on station there are potentially millions of liters of fuel here and we don't want any leaks or incidents there are triple safeties in place so that even if there is some kind of incident it is contained it is easily cleaned up the environmental and physical damage is mitigated and everything is kept safe and clean for humans structures and animals which there there are actually a lot of surprisingly there's hairs and muskox and reindeer Bears yesterday there was a bear here like right here I should actually keep my eye open for that it could be anywhere [Music] thank you [Music] so when I was telling my friends about this they had lots of questions basically the way it works is that planes come in and as you might imagine they have fuel but unlike a car planes have the ability to unload fuel as well I was also asked well Tom if it's on the ocean why not just bring in ships alert Bay behind me is too shallow for any major barges also you can tell it's covered in ice as is the rest of the ocean so you would only have a couple of weeks to get everything up here and that just won't work when you have people continuously using fuel for power and heat and hot water and cooking so generally the way it works is that planes will fly in and pull up onto the runway then in this beautiful room we hook them up to one of several hoses whether we are unfueling or refueling and distribute that fuel down to the appropriate tanks these gigantic tanks behind me house the three different types of fuel that are brought into alert there's jet fuel domestic Fuel and Diesel from the hose Shack just up the hill a little bit that we're step the fuel is then brought down here and goes through a series of pipes and valves and filters and pumps and then gets distributed into the appropriate tanks as you might imagine you don't want to mix Diesel with jet fuel whether the fuel is being pumped to the diesel dispenser or to the buildings or onto a plane all of that comes from here this building unfortunately is not heated and is by far the coldest building but that doesn't bother the fuel at all because you know fuel is not water and we don't have to worry about it freezing so much to simplify operations and supply all of the buildings up here are run on domestic fuel which is very similar to jet fuel jet fuel is separated and is reserved for the plants and then all of the vehicles run on diesel it just makes it easier it's ultra low sulfur diesel so the emissions are minimal it's a really simple and elegant system and it's actually kind of impressive the diesel system is the shortest Loop it comes from the airstrip through the pump house into the tanks and then is pumped just over there where there's a dispenser station for all of the vehicles refuel just like any other gas station except this one is gigantic and also very cold because you have to stand outside from the Airfield fuel that is destined for the buildings and the general operation of this place gets pumped up to these tanks here where it is stored there's much more room each of these tanks can hold hundreds of thousands of liters and can run this place for days if not months from these tanks behind me is a little building inside another set of pumps and controls and it gets further to another tank they like tanks up here which I guess is better than just Jerry cans and buckets so I shouldn't complain all right fuel has made it from the plane the lower tanks to the upper tanks and finally to this tank this tank is lovingly referred to as the day tank it is the smallest and it is used to supply all the buildings in the main compound all of them are piped in and connected to a pump and a loop it's actually really sweet and easy to work on you just flip on the pump and fill up the buildings this one's small as I mentioned and needs to be refilled fairly often but it's safer to have less fuel close to humans than those giant two-story three-story tall tanks full of domestic jet fuel so I wanted to go down this road to show you some of the pipeline and as you might imagine being in the Arctic snow removal is a continuous job some of the roads don't really get that much attention and you end up with a four foot tall wall of snow while there are some Vehicles here that can make it over this as you can tell there's tracks mine cannot mine's on Wheels and I will sink into this but behind me you can see our pipe bridge and that pipeline continues along the sides of all these buildings to fill the individual building tanks there's lots of Tanks no military tanks though which kind of disappointing I want to drive one one day every building has its own tank for the operations of that build this is one of those tanks this one is piped in piping there Dead Man's valve so that there's no accidents no overfilling and that heats the building some buildings have water it also heats the water so we get to have hot showers some of these buildings though don't have pipes it's just infeasible not cost effective and it's dangerous so there's a solution for this this lovely piece of equipment is the Bowser for all intents and purposes it is a giant fuel tank on Wheels this is what we drag around to fill up all of the auxiliary tanks that aren't connected to the pipeline not only does it hold thousands of liters of fuel it's also a full gas station the last stop on our tour of all things fuel related is arguably the most important building here this is the power plant the power plant runs non-stop 24 hours a day seven days a week 52 weeks a year it is the lifeblood of this place without a power plant running everything shuts down so from the planes to the pumps to the tanks it all ends here and as long as this keeps running people will still be up here for whatever reason it is so cold I don't know well friends that's about it for my time here it's been fun it's been cold but now I got a plan to catch thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed this video and I'll see you in the next one bye [Music]

Channel: Anywhere Goes

Views: 92,824

Keywords: alert Nunavut, alert nunavut canada, alert canada, alert base, canadian forces base alert, alert arctic, alerts canada, nunavut canada, nunavut canada arctic, canada arctic, canadian army arctic, arctic base canada, camp arctic, arctic camp canada, arctic nunavut, nunavut camp, nunavut case, artic nunavut, artic canada, alrt canada, alrt nunavut

Id: c4Ta9DEDnYc

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 24 2023