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magazine / ma07
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March/April 2007 issue |
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FEATURE
Undoing the dew line
Once the first line of
defence against a Soviet
missile attack, 42 radar
sites across Arctic Canada
were left contaminated
with oil, fuel and PCBs.
Why cleaning up those
sites is costing a fortune.
Excerpt of story by Arthur Johnson with photography
by Colin Rowe
When Lieutenant Colonel David Eagles,
an environmental engineer with the Department
of National Defence (DND), first went to the
Arctic to inspect some of the sites in the Distant
Early Warning (DEW) Line — a network of
military radar stations stretching along the
Arctic coast from Alaska to Greenland — he
was dismayed and outraged to see the evidence
of disregard for the environment by the men
who had worked there.
top
"They used to have barrel-rolling contests,"
he says. "They'd get these empty, or partly
empty, fuel barrels and roll them down a hill to
see how far they could go."
When they tired of the sport, they left the
barrels to rust where they lay. What's more,
personnel at many sites buried garbage all over
the place. Sometimes the disposal of waste
seemed planned to inflict the maximum damage
on the environment.
"Why did they place garbage in several different
dump sites?" asks Eagles, project manager
of what has become one of the most extensive
and expensive environmental cleanups ever
undertaken in Canada. "And why did they put
a garbage dump right beside the river?"
For the rest of this story, visit your local newsstand or go to our store to buy this issue.
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