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, we're replacing the DEW
line with a modernized system made up largely of unstaffed
stations. Every year, from 1995 to 2008, we're taking down
two sites Canada no longer needs.
 But
taking down the DEW line also means handling the biggest environmental
cleanup in North America, one that is also happening in one of the
world's most fragile ecosystems. As the project managers, we have
to make sure that contamination doesn't get into the Arctic food
chain, and we have to remove the facilities so thoroughly that they
no longer pose any threat to health or safety.
 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.
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