Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Early History: Beginning to Understand the Behaviour
of POPs and Mercury in the Arctic
In the early 1980s, I was working for the Canadian government and managing the Beaufort
Environmental Monitoring Programme (BEMP). Across the floor in a different directorate
was Garth Bangay. We encountered Garth earlier during the formation of the Arctic Envir-
onmental Protection Strategy and the Arctic Council. Garth had a knack for attracting hot
potatoes, and at that time, it was the cleanup of abandoned Distant Early Warning (DEW)
Line stations. Sixty-three of these linked radar stations were built from Alaska to southern
Baffin Island to warn North America of any approaching military force that would be taking
the polar route. These stations were later abandoned with one pulse in the late 1960s and
another in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This marked the end of the DEW Line. The up-
graded replacement (the North Warning System) involved comparatively few stations. The
abandonment of those first stations was very simple. The military simply packed its person-
al items and any classified material and departed, leaving behind the buildings, electrical
equipment (containing polychlorinated biphenyls [PCBs]) and barrels of fuel and other flu-
ids outside.
Northern Canada appears in coffee-table topics as a vast pristine and pure environment.
However, for Canadian governments, it has always represented a promise of huge nonre-
newable resource development. It is a philosophy that has never been more intense than it
is today. In the mid-1970s, Arctic indigenous communities became more and more uneasy
aboutthepotential impact of“southern” activities intheirhomelands. Atthesametime, they
noticed changes in the health of their families and of the animals on which their diet de-
pends. They were frustrated that whenever a southern activity was completed in the North,
the standard abandonment plan was to leave everything behind - be it toxic tailings ponds or
barrels of unidentified fluids. This situation was also frustrating for those of us who tried un-
successfully to ensure that new development activities (usually involving public subsidy in
some form) came with realistic abandonment plans that were secure and independently fun-
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