Environmental Engineering Reference
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ded - only to be brushed aside with the rubric of “national economic growth” and “jobs for
Canadians”. Then, with bankruptcy frequently shutting down such operations a few years
later, pollution treatment facilities at the abandoned sites would often be required “in per-
petuity” at public expense. I suppose we should have been partly happy. In earlier times,
everything would have been left to rot. The abandoned DEW Line stations were the last
straw that exhausted the patience of Arctic indigenous communities.
It was obvious to Garth that the greatest potential hazard at the abandoned DEW Line
sites came from the PCBs in electrical fluids and in the paints and sealants (that contained
PCBs to make them less brittle at a cold temperature). It was well known that some of
the fluids had leaked. To know if these fluids could cause a dietary hazard for indigenous
peoples and to gather funding for cleanup, he needed to know how far away from a station
the contamination had spread and exactly what it had spread into. In 1985, he set up an
“interagency working group on contaminants in native diets”. At the same time, he funded
some sampling around a few of the sites. After overcoming an analytical problem at one of
the Environment Canada laboratories, he found that PCBs were showing up everywhere he
looked, not just at the DEW Line stations. However, PCBs were not the only problem. To
help Garth, I used some of my programme funding for Michael Wong to make a literature
search of all scientific publications that reported on contaminants in wild foods harvested
in northern Canada. Michael's report also became available in 1985. It was, to use modern
slang, a “game changer”. The data were sparse and different methodologies made compar-
isons difficult. Nevertheless, there was no escape from the obvious conclusion: PCBs were
widespread in wild aquatic foods of indigenous peoples in the Canadian Arctic, as were a
number of other man-made organic substances that had almost certainly never been used
at the DEW Line sites. In addition, several metals were showing up that needed investiga-
tion, especially lead, cadmium and mercury. It was later found that the PCB signature for
a DEW Line station could extend to about 20 km. Beyond that, something else was going
on.
We quickly noticed that except for lead, cadmium and mercury, all the substances that
were appearing at surprising and unexplained concentrations were organochlorines. These
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