My name is Jeremy Anglesey, I'm a senior environmental program officer at Environment Canada in the Contaminated Sites division.
Recently I had the opportunity of travelling to Nunavut with some of my my federal colleagues
to see some of the work happening at the Dew Line cleanup project.
Typically this contamination occurred from historical practices
which may have been typical at the time but are no longer acceptable.
Dave Eagles: The Dew Line was the third line of defence for North America built to detect
Russian bombers or back then Soviet bombers coming over the North Pole and attacking North America.
And so when the US Military decided they needed this system, based on the technology and the weapons of the day,
they came to the Canadian government and said we'd like to build this
radar chain of 63 stations across North America stretching through Greenland to Iceland.
And it just so happens two thirds of the sites we need are on Canadian soil.
The Canadian government, as has been told to me,
said well we've just finished building two of our own, we don't have any money left,
if you want to build it we will let you have access to the land but you pay for it.
So the Americans essentially paid for this which at the time was the largest engineering project in the world.
So it was a very challenging and amazing engineering feat to get all this equipment there and build it as quickly as they did.
There were many lives lost, aircraft accidents, exposure and other construction accidents.
But back then health and safety wasn't looked upon the same way.
Unknown Male: Appointed places of assembly for the sea lifts came the materials that would be the Dew Line.
Supplies of petroleum, oil and lubricants built up acre on acre at Long Beach on the west coast, Philadelphia in the east.
In June they started loading on the west coast. The petroleum first.
Then these ships went on to Seattle. At Seattle they loaded for a solid month.
At Halifax lading for the east coast sea lift continued for a month plus 10 days.
Dave Eagles: People didn't really, weren't really concerned about the environment.
It was remote, hardly anyone lived there,
these sites were in the middle of nowhere far from anyone's imagination and therefore the environment wasn't at the fore.
Christine Gauthier: It wasn't until we got there that I had a full understanding of what was there.
We'd walk along the beach, these beautiful beaches and there would be just fuel barrels left there rusting away.
There was a waterfall where they had just left a tractor right in the crevice caused by the waterfall.
It was surprising to see such a disregard for the environment
and how their materials that they no longer needed anymore were just left out to rust and to sit on the landscape.
Jeremy Anglesey: Some of the contaminants that were found at the Dew Line sites,
the most significant of which are the PCB's, lead, chromium, copper, diesel fuel for operating generators, waste oil from heavy equipment.
So all of these contaminants because of the nature of these sites had to be basically just left on site because there was nowhere for them to go.
So when the, when the sites were decommissioned from an operational standpoint,
when National Defence no longer required use of the sites, the contamination and all of the sources of contamination were largely just left in place.
Unknown Male: All together aircraft carried 30,000 tons of machinery and supplies to Dew Line sites.
Finishing the module interiors solved the problem of providing shelter on the Dew Line that would be adequate, comfortable and safe.
Dave Eagles: Anything that's PCB painted has to go to one of two locations, to either indoor landfill here depending on the regulation,
or we have to get a pellet blaster in here, steel pellets blast it all,
gather up all the droppings like this and ship them south to Swan Hills and then the steel can just be put in a non haz.
Christine Gauthier: DND owns 2.25 million hectares of land across the country. That's twice the size of PEI.
And by the nature, the very nature of the activity is that DND and the Canadian Forces undertake, we're going to have an impact on the environment.
And because of that, DND takes it's environmental programs very seriously and is looking at ways to minimize
our current impact on the environment and also cleaning up past mistakes.
So that's something that's currently ongoing. And has been worked into our everyday practices and policies.
Holmer Berthiaume: The project is estimated to cost the Department $580 million.
And I guess the logistics associated with doing clean up projects in the north are pretty complicated and expensive.
So we need to for a very short, we have a very short construction season, but to just get to the site requires a lot of planning,
shipment of equipment, camps, material, etcetera, virtually has to happen.
It will take one summer just to get the material up there and then you have to set up camp and come back next year to actually start any of the, any of the cleanup work.
Jeremy Anglesey: In many cases where the science has indicated that the contamination is, can be dealt with efficiently and effectively on site,
secure landfills and engineered, properly engineered landfills have been built and waste has been stored right on site.
Dave Eagles: In this landfill would be soil that had contaminants that were not safe enough to put in a
non hazardous landfill, but weren't serious enough that we had to box and ship to a special facility.
So we'd be talking lead in small amounts, we'd be talking PCB's in less then 5 parts per million, greater than .5 and less then 5 parts per million.
We could have type A hydrocarbons. So there are things that we can't get rid of some other way,
but they're safe enough in this leaching contained landfill to be left here forever.
Jeremy Anglesey: What you're left with is a site or a landscape that looks very similar to the landscape around it,
with very little indication other than perhaps the different colour rocks and the plaque denonating that what had happened here.
Christine Gauthier: The only thing that made you realize that there had once been a Dew Line site there was the,
well the regularity of the terrain and also the colour of the stone because it was stone taken from inside the landfills.
That stone as it gets oxidized will darken and become closer to the colour of the other stones.
So I'm assuming if someday I get to go back there in another 10 or 20 years it will be even more difficult to tell where, where the Dew, actual Dew Line site used to be.
Dave Eagles: We're doing a study right now at a site called Dimaine(ph) to look at how we can re-vegetate these sites more quicker.
For instance if you put small furrows in the top of the landfill instead of it being perfectly flat, it allows a place for a seed from a plant to roll along the ground,
fall in this little crack or this crevice and then the snow melts there and it gets moisture, it gets stopped there from the wind, a little wind protection.
And a plant can grow. So we found sites that we didn't finish as well as we'd like, we've actually found they re-vegetated better.
So we're now saying well maybe we don't want a perfect finish, we want a slightly rugged finish so that they re-vegetate more quickly.
Homer Berthiaume: Today we find ourselves at the point where we have completed 14 of the 21 sites.
The other 7 sites are pretty, I would say 6 are underway with the 7th just being on the verge of going out to tender.
The environment in the north is very unique in that the aboriginal people continue to live off the land and therefore it was very important that we restore it
to as an original condition as we could so that they could continue to live off the land the way they do right now.
Unknown Male: That would be the finest reward of all for the men who built the Dew Line.