Distant Early Warning-line site clean-up closer
Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services
Pelly Bay (Mar 26/01) - Plans for the cleanup of the Distant Early Warning-line site near here should be well under way by the summer.
With the call for tenders set to close at the end of April, officials working on the overall DEW-line cleanup said a contractor should be in place by May.
While the economic agreement between Nunavut Tunngavik and the Department of National Defence is not yet settled, work on the site will still proceed. The economic agreement ensures Inuit labour and businesses are get much of the work during the remediation of the former military sites. To ensure employment levels reflect Nunavut's population in Kugaaruk's cleanup, it was mandated that 75 per cent of the workers hired by the contractor to work on site must be Inuit.
Pete Quinn, the project manager of the DEW-line cleanup, said there were several components involved in the remediation of the 15 sites DND is responsible for in Nunavut. In that the basic structure and materials are the same at all of the sites, Quinn said the work to be done was essentially the same in Nunavut, the NWT and the Yukon.
"The first major component is the demolition of all the old facilities, the demolition of all the old fuel tanks and pipelines and buildings," said Quinn.
On-site landfills
Non-hazardous material will be separated from contaminated materials and buried in an on-site landfill.
Hazardous materials, depending upon their nature, will be treated in a variety of different ways. Much of the material will be stored on site, in landfills designed to handle various levels of contamination.
Contaminated material includes soil contaminated by hydrocarbons, asbestos doors and painted materials containing PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls).
Material containing PCBs with more than 50 PPM, as well as other toxins that violate federal standards, will be properly contained and shipped off site during the summer season.
Wayne Ingham, of the Environmental Sciences Group, said the average level of PCB contamination at DND's DEW-line sites is roughly 3,000-4,000 PPM although numbers do go as high as 20,000 PPM. One sample showed 75,000 PPM.
Quinn also said the site's existing landfills would have to be cleaned up. He said the ones that were in good shape and not leaching contaminants into the environment would likely be left as is, while those leaching toxins would be redesigned using liners that would freeze into the permafrost.
A complex monitoring system is then established to ensure the landfills are working. The cleanup will take three years to complete.
