DEW Line Clean-up

DEW Line Clean-up : restoring the north

Look at the top of your globe, and you'll see that Canada and Russia are just a few hundred miles of icy ocean apart. During the Cold War, that was a real worry, so in 1957, Canada and the United States strung a distant early warning (DEW) line across the Arctic.

With the Cold War over, Canada is replacing the DEW line with a modernized system made up largely of unstaffed stations. The clean-up is a project managed by the Department of National Defence. DCC is executing the work through the use of contractors and in-house employees.

The DEW Line clean-up represents one of the biggest environmental clean ups in North America, one that is also happening in one of the most fragile ecosystems in the world. The bottom line goal of the project is to remediate the sites so that contamination does not get into the Arctic food chain.

Complicating things are the brutal climate and terrain of the North. Some sites are on rocky beaches; others cling to cliffs. All of them are built on permafrost that changes with the seasons. Temperatures can drop 25 degrees overnight. And the terrific cold means that the job can only go ahead a few months of the year.

Conditions are so tough that much of the technology you would use for similar jobs in the South is almost useless, so we are bringing along people who are working out the science as we go along, developing new solutions on the fly that will be of service to other environmentally challenging sectors in the North, such as mining.