Safety Last

Photo: Sermersooq Council

For some months now, the local authorities have been working on demolishing a rocky hill, crushing down the rocks into various sizes to use in the construction of the new harbour in Nuuk. It’s an ambitious and exciting project, changing the face of the town, and creating new infrastructure for a more modern city. When the project is finished, the new harbour facility will be linked via a bridge to the main road. But it’s the practicalities of building this stuff that make me edgy.

Every day, the bus I take to work drives past the blasting quarry. It is, literally, right by the side of the busy road. When they’re blasting, they stop the traffic – Safety First. But several such blasts over the past few weeks have launched massive boulders onto the road. In the days after such events, the traffic weaves around them, until the truck crane moves in to clear them away. As hundred tonne blocks are lifted over the road, the cars continue driving beneath them. Since learning this, I have felt a little breathless passing the roadside development, for good reason it seems. On Saturday, a blast sent the pictured rock hurtling through the large glass windows of the public pool where around fifty bathers were taking their morning swim.

Unfortunately, these are not such isolated incidents. In general, adherence to the mantra – Safety First – is, well, non-compliant in Greenland. A stroll around town on any given day will yield jaw-dropping safety hazards. A shipping container filled with building materials for a construction site is balanced on a selection of randomly-oriented wooden pallets, stacked above rocky, uneven ground, and placed beside a public walkway. A large motor boat sits precariously on another stack of pallets, high above the ground, by the side of an apartment building, with the bow-line tied to the wooden railing of the building’s balcony. Does the owner reason that if his boat is going to be destroyed he may as well also destroy his home?