Kerry McCluskey
Northern News Services

IQALUIT (Mar 15/99) - With the bulk of the site infrastructure now in place, officials working on the clean up of an abandoned military facility say they're ready to get down to the serious business of remediation.

Scott Mitchell, the head of the contaminated sites office for the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs, said last week in Iqaluit that one of the primary goals for the second year of the clean-up project on Resolution Island was to eliminate any contact that PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) have had with the environment.

"There are the highest levels and volumes of contaminants of all the sites in the NWT," said Mitchell, an advocate of the project since the early '90s.

Located 310 kilometres to the south of Baffin Island, the remote site was developed by the United States Air Force in 1953 during the Cold War.

The island was abandoned in 1972 by the U.S. and sold to the GNWT by the government of Canada in 1976 for $3,000. DIAND became the agency responsible for cleaning up the PCBs, asbestos, lead, mercury, hydrocarbons and cobalt that have leached into the soil and the marine environment.

It is expected to cost almost $40 million to bring the site into compliance with the Canadian Environmental Protection Act (CEPA), which says PCB levels must be reduced to 50 parts per million (ppm). Levels on the island currently go as high as 8,000 ppm and many of the other toxins are said to potentially violate the Fisheries Act.

To date, the Qikiqtaaluk Corporation, the site contractor, has built employee accommodations, developed roadways and orchestrated the clean up of five tonnes of liquid PCBs, or a total of 27 drums of PCB-laden oil. They are slated to be removed from the island this summer.

Mitchell said when the camp opens for the 1999 season on June 15, an additional 10 tonnes of PCBs, or about 4,700 cubic metres of dirt, will be cleaned up and stored until a method of PCB disposal is chosen.

"They're mixed in the soils on the beach and up on the top of the island," said Mitchell.

He explained this year's clean-up plan also calls for different oil products to be incinerated, more roads to be built and existing roads maintained and two non-hazardous landfill sites to be designed and constructed.

It also includes plans for non-contaminated buildings to be deconstructed, repairs on the buildings that house the contaminated dirt containers to be completed and the shredding of nearly 50,000 discarded iron barrels to begin. Toxic sites containing high levels of mercury and lead will also be cleaned up.

In order to meet all of those goals, Pitseolak Pfeifer, QC's chief executive officer, said about 70 employees would be hired, 85 per cent of whom will be Inuit.

"It's a long-term QC goal to provide training and experience for Inuit," said Pfeifer, explaining that a comparable number of employees were trained on site in 1998. As well as receiving instruction on dealing with hazardous wastes, the work crews also developed skills in a number of trades and administrative duties. Pfeifer said QC hoped to take this trained and successful workforce to DIAND in the future and use it to lobby for additional remediation contracts.

"We need to convince the federal government we are able to continue and as a corporation, do work on the other sites in the Baffin," said Pfeifer.

QC's president Jerry Ell also stressed the project's training mandate and said he hoped a trades program at Nunavut Arctic College would eventually develop, allowing the employees to receive ongoing training closer to home.

An announcement from DIAND headquarters in Ottawa concerning funding for the 1999 season was still pending at the time the work plan was announced last week, but the amount is expected to be in the neighbourhood of $5 million.