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IKALUKTUTIAK/CAMBRIDGE BAY
Gone are the old buildings, hangars and warehouses and back is the tundra and wildlife as another Distance Early Warning site has been cleaned up.

The Department of National Defence operated the PIN-4 DEW line site by Byron Bay on Victoria Island until 1993. Left behind were the buildings, landfills and contaminants requiring remediation.

The actual cleanup did not start until 2009, two years later than planned, because of problems getting the necessary equipment to site, explained Dave Eagles, project manager for the DEW line cleanup project with the Department of National Defence (DND). He added they went back this past summer to complete the remediation.

The federal government invested about $17.6 million overall for the cleanup, including the scientific investigation and engineering supports as well as the contract management, said Eagles.

"Over 70 per cent of the work on site was done by Inuit, mainly from Cambridge Bay, and that's quite a high percentage," he said. "The excavator operators, dump truck operators and support staff - 70 per cent of the people on site were Inuit, which is quite high compared to a mine site. And about 84 per cent of all the contracting was through Inuit-owned companies."

Cleaning the site went very well for Kitnuna, the Cambridge-Bay based company which was awarded the remediation contract, said Brad Atchison, president and chief executive officer at Kitnuna. Although it was difficult to set up at the beginning, he added the last two seasons went very well.

The clean up projects all have elements of the same things, namely demolishing buildings, dealing with contaminants such as PCBs, hydrocarbon and asbestos as well as landfills, Atchison explained.

"Now it's got no signs of human habitation other than the remnants of great big mounds of earth that contain some of the building components left behind, but it's all covered in soil and gravel and grass seed," he said.

The demolition of the module train, hangar, warehouse, garage, tank farm and radome - the structural enclosure protecting an antenna - was a large component of the project, explained Don Beattie, associate project manager for the PIN-4 site with Defence Construction Canada.

"In general, I think this particular module train and the buildings were in pretty good shape," he said. "They were sealed up pretty good when DND left them and as long as the buildings were still intact and the weather couldn't get inside, in general they stayed in pretty good condition."

With the garbage the site generated through the years, impromptu landfills could be found around the site, he added. Low-risk landfills containing old metal debris, for instance, were capped on site, said Beattie. He said anything a little bit more hazardous was excavated and sorted. Hazardous material was hauled off site. This includes 120,000 kg of PCB-amended paint, explained Beattie, 30,000 kg of PCB-contaminated soils and 420,000 kg of leachable lead in certain soils.

"I wouldn't say it was a particularly contaminated site, as far as the soils are concerned," he said.

The cleanup of the DYE-Main Cape Dyer site is ongoing, expected to be completed in 2013. Remediation of the 20 other sites is complete.

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