What is Civil Engineering ?

Cold Region Engineering

Photos courtesy Ed Grozic, EBA Engineering Consultants Ltd.

Cold Region Engineering is helping make resource development in the north economical and environmentally responsible. The construction of permanent and temporary communities in remote areas of the North involves the building of living and working spaces as well as the necessary infrastructure to support them. The development of infrastructure that can survive the cold regions could be a matter of life and death.


Arctic sunset, Committee Bay, Nunavut.


Hamlet of Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories


Unloading supplies at a remote arctic site from a C-46 aircraft owned and operated by Buffalo Air (CAM-4 DEW Line Site, Nunavut)

Air transportation is the only year-round means of transport for much of the North. Marine transportation is seasonal but extremely important to local people and construction projects in many areas.

Cold Region engineers try to take into consideration the environmental risks involved with the projects carried out in the far North.


Exploration drilling in the arctic.



Pogo Gold Project, Alaska. Construction of a lined pad to store mineralized rock generated from an underground exploration program.

More on Cold Region engineering in the far North.

Permafrost, Pipes and People

All three coexist in Inuvik, a northern town with a well-pondered genesis. And thanks to forethought and sound engineering, the challenges of the north are well met in a community Diefenbaker said would bring 'new opportunity to the people of the western Arctic.'

The PEGG, January 2006 (newspaper of the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists & Geophysicists of Alberta)

Associated Sites:

EBA Engineering Consultants Ltd.

Canadian Hydraulic Centre