A former Giant Mine fire truck has been vandalized.
Ryan Silke, from the NWT Mining Heritage Society, posted photos online showing the fire truck missing a door. Silke believes someone used a saw to carve the door away from the vehicle.
“This is an important and unique part of the museum displays in this area, and a major public and tourist attraction,” Silke wrote on Facebook.
“To the person who illegally removed the door: this has been reported to the RCMP. You have vandalized our local heritage, and ruined the hard work of community volunteers, for your own personal glory.”
The society has since confirmed the door was returned to the site by Monday morning, along with a note of apology.
Society members have been working to preserve items related to the former gold mine, which ceased operations in 2004.
This damage comes at a difficult time for Giant’s mining heritage, with the mine’s iconic C-shaft headframe in the process of being dismantled.
Much of the wooden structure has been removed and the remaining steel frame is now coming down. The mine’s A-shaft headframe is expected to be next in line for deconstruction as the federal government works to make safe the contaminated site of the former gold mine, ahead of a decades-long clean-up operation.
“We knew it was coming,” said Walt Humphries, president of the Mining Heritage Society. “It’s one of the last headframes in town, so it’s sad in that respect.
“But the C-shaft is in a unique position because it’s right where they’re doing the clean-up. It was an old, wooden headframe with a steel structure inside and it would have been very, very expensive to save it.
“You can’t save all the headframes. I wish we could save one or two of them, though. When you climb Pilot’s Monument you see the headframes and it reminds everybody that Yellowknife started out as a mining town. It’s an era passing.”
