Nunatsiaq News, August 16, 1996

Iqaluit's "Upper Base" About to Become a Memory

IQALUIT-By the end of August, Iqaluit residents will be free to enjoy the land where a longtime eyesore and environmental hazard once stood.

That's when workers should be finished removing the last traces of Upper Base.

For more than a year, local officials have been asking residents to stay away from the site until workers finish removing contaminated soil and demolishing buildings at the abandoned military installation.

When they're done, all that will remain are a few concrete foundations where buildings once stood and a plaque informing passers-by of the site's history.

By the end of last summer, all but four buildings and the site's two massive radio dishes had been demolished. Workers also managed to pick up most of the scattered garbage from around the site, which ranged from pieces of buildings and equipment to rusting beer cans.

The dishes and the last few buildings came down earlier this summer. Workers also filled smoothed out gaping holes where buildings once stood.

People who remember the sprawling complex of ramshackle buildings will be pleasantly surprised when they see what the site looks like now, said Sara Brown, an engineer with the Town of Iqaluit.

"I've taken a couple of people up there already and their jaws have just dropped," she said Monday.

While the clean-up may make the site look more appealing, its purpose was much more extensive: to remove the environmental risk posed by some of the materials used during the former base's operation.

Part of this year's clean-up involves removing the concrete foundation of one building and chipping away part of the foundation of another. Some buildings and the soil around them were contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

Once commonly used as a lubricant for electrical equipment, scientists have since discovered that PCBs cause cancer in laboratory animals and have been linked to health problems like birth defects and deformities in wildlife.

Coming into casual contact with PCBs doesn't put humans at risk, but they are a hazard if left in the environment, because they don't break down naturally.

Instead, they can build up in the fatty tissue of animals feeding on contaminated vegetation and be passed up the food chain to humans.

Last year, workers removed 465 drums of PCB-contaminated soil from around the site. Soil that exceeded Canadian environmental protection standards was flown to a facility in Swan Hills, Alberta, where the PCBs could be safely incinerated.

About 400 boxes of less-contaminated soil were stored at the site over the winter and will be shipped south sometime this year. Although the soil meets environmental protection standards, clean-up officials decided it would be safer to remove it altogether.

"We just felt that [the] soils needed to be taken out of the Arctic environment because of the ability of PCBs to get into the food chain," said Scott Mitchell, regional manager of the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs' Arctic Environmental Strategy.

Soil with the lowest level of contamination was buried in an on-site landfill built last year.

Workers also spent last summer removing asbestos from buildings and debris scattered around the site. Asbestos was commonly used to insulate buildings and pipes, but has since been discovered to cause respiratory damage if its particles are inhaled. The asbestos was sealed in bags and buried in the on-site landfill.

Although it's become an ugly environmental hazard over the years, Upper Base played a vital role in defending North America from a nuclear attack during the Cold War. The base was part of a network of military installations intended to provide warning of a Soviet air strike coming from over the North Pole.

But new technology introduced during the arms race, like military satellites and intercontinental ballistic missiles, rendered the radar bases obsolete and Upper Base was abandoned by the U.S. Air Force in the 1974.

The Arctic Environmental Strategy was started in 1991 by the federal government. The strategy's "Action on Waste" component was established in part to pay for the clean-up of polluted sites and other waste problems across the Canadian Arctic.

Action on Waste has provided close to $6 million for the clean-up in Iqaluit, Mitchell said. In addition to funding the job at Upper Base, the program also provided money to shred more than 100,000 steel drums that have piled up at the municipality's North 40 dump site over the years.

Workers shredded about a third of that amount last year, the contractor in charge of the job this year hopes to shred the remaining 70,000.

Twenty-two local employees are working 10-hour shifts to finish the job, said Gary Vaillancourt, whose Yellowknife-based company has been contracted by the town to do the job.

The workers are using a $600,000 shredder to reduce the barrels to about 10 per cent of their original volume.

Nicknamed "Mikey," the shredder is on loan from the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. A second shredder will arrive by sealift later this month.

The town will instead use the shredded barrels as fill in a parking lot that's being constructed at the municipal public works garage.

"We've been having more and more difficulty finding gravel, so there's a definite advantage to using this material instead," Brown said.