The Distant Early Warning
Line, or DEW Line, was
a series of radar stations
across the arctic,
from Alaska through Canada over Greenland to Iceland.
The Americans conceived that the DEW
line could detect enemy bombers
coming over the North Pole that could
threaten North American cities.
Back in the early 1950s, the U.S. government
determined that they needed
a series of radar stations across the Arctic that could
detect enemy bombers coming over the Pole.
The U.S. needed Canadian territory
to detect the enemy bombers far
enough away so they asked the Canadian
government to partner with them.
However, the Canadian government
had just finished building two
lines and didn’t have the resources
really to do another line.
So they agreed with the Americans, yes,
we need this line, and as long as you
pay for it and construct it, we will
allow you access to Canadian territory.
The DEW Line clean-up project was the largest engineering project at the time in the world.
It involved over 30 000 tons of supply,
that’s like 10 000 railcars
full of supplies that
were shipped up here by
ship and by aircraft.
And the whole thing was done in less than three years.
The DEW Line was shut down in the late 1980s.
The reason was the technology had changed
so much that Canada and the U.S.
realized they needed a new
series of radar stations
to replace the DEW Line, and that was the birth of the North Warning System.
We became aware of
environmental problems at the
former DEW Lines sites in
1989 when both Canada and
the United States commissioned
environmental studies
to see what was the
effect of the DEW Line.
The DEW Line Clean-up Protocol
was established with other
government departments and
the people of the north,
to determine the risk proposed by the DEW Line sites.
The risk of the DEW
Line sites was mainly a
local risk about 10
kilometers around the sites
and it was caused by
contaminated soil and
the contents of landfills
left on the sites.
There was really only a
long-term environmental risk to
these sites - the contamination
of the sites is not severe.
However, it would have
a long-term effect
on the ecosystem and
on human health.
The DEW Line clean-up project was established in the early 1990s.
It was a National Defence project to clean up the former radar sites,
to stop the environmental
contamination that’s
on the sites getting
into the environment.
DYE-Main was the largest of the 21 sites.
It’s located on the eastern end of Baffin Island,
and it was a communications hub and a sector hub.
So it was the largest site.
I’ve been told its had as
many as 200 people living
on the site at one time.
The clean-up involved demolishing old buildings,
removing hazardous materials from the buildings.
We had to construct landfills,
we had to re-grade and improve
existing landfills on site,
pick up scattered debris.
And then generally leave the
area so that we wouldn’t
hurt the permafrost or cause
any additional erosion.
The cost of the DEW Line clean-up was
$575 million dollars.
And that’s for what was
the largest environmental
project by the Canadian
government at the time.
There were many partners during the DEW Line clean-up.
The various government departments such as Health Canada,
Indian and Northern Affairs, and Environment Canada,
were involved with this.
But the key partners were the Inuit and Inuvialuit.
And they worked with us in a true partnership to develop what was required
on these sites and to make sure they were cleaned up properly.
Now that all the sites have been cleaned up,
we’ve instituted a monitoring program
to look at each of the sites, for the first five years.
Each year, take soil
and water samples, to
make sure they’ve been
cleaned up properly.
Stayed cleaned up, and then after five years in different intervals,
we’ll be coming back
to make sure we
leave no hazard to
the environment.
The many workers on the
DEW Line clean-up sites
are very proud of the
work they’ve done.
I think as Canadians we should be proud
that we’ve seen a problem, and we’ve properly cleaned it up
and now there’s no further problem for the environment.