Isn't it nice to know that our fathers worked on these bases around this crap!
This was in our local paper recently.


www.nugget.ca

Abandoned radar bases remain toxic legacy


- Tuesday, July 31, 2007 @ 08:00

The cleanup of the toxic legacy that is the mid-Canada line radar bases could be completed within a decade.

Ontario's Ministry of Natural Resources is now in "official negotiations" with the Department of National Defence to work out a cost-sharing agreement, said Mike Cartan, the ministry's far north manager.

"We've been negotiating officially since April," Cartan said. "We're trying to move along as quickly as we can to make sure the cleanup starts next year."

The next meeting between the provincial and federal government agencies is scheduled for the fall, and if an agreement is struck, the earliest cleanup will begin is the following spring.

Canada's Department of National Defence established the mid-Canada line radar bases in the 1960s.

DND later abandoned the sites and gave the land back to the province.

At many sites, barrels of oil, fuel and PCBs have been left to rust for decades.

Some of these barrels have rusted through, allowing their contents to spill into the soil and nearby water bodies.

There are 17 sites that make up Ontario's mid-Canada line. Only one near Fort Albany has been cleaned.

The other 16 remain an environmental mess as chemicals continue to leech from the rusted barrels into the land.

If the governments started taking care of these 16 sites in spring 2008, the ministry estimates the work would be completed by 2015.

"It would be a six-year project," Cartan said.

The MNR's most recent cost estimate put the project in the realm of $60 million, however, that may no longer be the case.

"That was a few years ago," he said. "So it is going to be more than that now."

Most of the radar bases are situated along the Hudson Bay and James Bay coasts.

There are two more southern sites, one along the railway between Cochrane and Moosonee and the other just north of the Ramore area.

While most of these sites are out of the general public's view, their environmental effects have been crippling to residents of Ontario's far North.

One site near Daniel Koostachin's Peawanuck home has forever disrupted the lifestyle of his family.

Koostachin's father had 12 square kilometres of traditional land he used as a trap line. Today, not a single metre can be used.

What wasn't destroyed by the construction of the radar base has been contaminated by the chemicals that DND left behind, he said.

"They came in and destroyed everything," he said. "Everything my father had is now gone."

Koostachin's father died in the mid-'80s, but until his death he fought the federal government.

He started by trying to bargain with DND.

"My father said if they got off the land and if they moved everything away he would give them $2,000," Koostachin said.

When that didn't work, Koostachin's father began demanding he be compensated for the land. But without a lawyer and unable to speak either of Canada's official languages, the Cree elder could not reach any kind of settlement before his death.

Koostachin wants to continue his father's fight, but he said he feels lost in a legal maze.

The site near Peawanuck is a mountain of rusted barrels. Some 50,000 of these drums have been left near the Winisk River and thousands have already rusted out their contents, said MP Charlie Angus.

The NDP representative for Timmins-James Bay said he couldn't verify Koostachin's claim to the destroyed land near Peawanuck, but it's a story shared by thousands.

The blood levels of fish and animals near some of these abandoned radar bases have 16,000 times the allowable level of PCBs.

"It's a horror story," Angus said. "The (federal government) kept an eye on this for years and never told anyone - they simply issued occasional warnings for people not to eat the fish."

The warnings alone are meaningless. Wild meat and fish make up such a major part of the diet in the far North that a simple warning won't help anyone, he said.

For decades the responsibility of the toxic radar base sites has been bounced around between the federal and provincial governments. The fact DND has openly agreed to participate in negotiations with Ontario's MNR is "a really big step in the right direction," Angus said.

"We have taken the biggest step, and that's getting the federal government to recognize it has a responsibility," he said.

DND officials declined to comment.