George Hunter, 45, who is a former chief of the Weenusk First Nation located in Peawanuck Northern Ontario climbs over abandoned barrels that once contained fuel at Site 500. Site 500 was a Canadian Military base operated during 1952-1967 during the cold war as a radar base.
Six decades after the radar operators gave up their search for Russian bombers streaking across the Northern Ontario sky, a massive cleanup effort will finally begin to erase a ghost town that was very briefly one of Canada's most important military installations.
The town doesn't even have a formal name - military documents simply refer to it as Site 500. It was the operations centre for the Ontario portion of the Mid Canada Line Radar installation, a network of 17 sites built as part of a national network in the 1950s to monitor the skies for foreign invaders.
Site 500 is now at the centre of the largest environmental remediation project ever undertaken in Ontario. Its scale is dwarfed only by the national cleanup of the Distant Early Warning radar line - a more northern string of radar installations that the federal government has already spent half a billion dollars cleaning.
The sites have leached contaminants into the ground over the years. PCBs, chemicals that were used in industrial products such as coolant and lubricants and have since been found to cause cancer at high levels, have been discovered in the soil, and asbestos is common in the buildings. Abandoned trucks litter the site; oil drums are scattered everywhere.
The project has received little attention because the sites are inaccessible by road and hidden away in the wilds of Northern Ontario. If not for decades of effort by first nations groups who rely on the land for fishing and hunting, the sites may have been left to rot as the federal and provincial governments bickered over who was responsible for cleaning them up.
The Department of Defence used the sites, but gave them back to the province after they were shut down. Under a recent agreement, the province will spend up to $100-million to wipe out the remnants of the radar line by 2017, with a $30-million contribution from the federal government.
Tucked away on the southern shores of Hudson Bay within Polar Bear Provincial Park, the line was disabled in the 1960s after intercontinental ballistic missile technology rendered the entire project obsolete. When operational, a few dozen people called Site 500 home; now a handful of hunters use its buildings for shelter a few weeks each year.
Site 500 is the largest of the cleanup destinations, where 20 buildings remain, including an aircraft hangar, control tower and gymnasium. Thirty thousand empty oil barrels are piled haphazardly at the site, which is difficult to reach by land. They will either have to be hauled away, or workers will need to build a proper landfill onsite.
"This project poses significant logistical challenges," said Michael Cantan, who is overseeing the cleanup for Ontario's Ministry of Natural Resources. "There are no roads, so workers need barges and helicopters. The scale of the work is pretty staggering."
While the radar line stretched from coast to coast, Site 500 is the most remote site requiring remediation. Many sites across the rest of the country were reclaimed - in Manitoba, one remote outpost houses a school. In Stephenville, Nfld., upgraded radars scan the skies from a former installation.
Unlike Site 500, most of the Ontario sites targeted for cleanup are small outposts. Site 415 - on the eastern shores of James Bay - is the exception. The military left behind four radar dishes that resemble large drive-in movie screens, which will need to be removed.
The cleanup is seen as critical to the first nations who hunt and fish in the area - thousands of fuel barrels left behind have been seeping PCBs and hydrocarbons into the earth and contaminating local wildlife. Their efforts to have the sites cleaned intensified 10 years ago, when a study determined that rabbits near one of the sites had unusually high levels of PCBs and should not be eaten.
"We've been working for 30 years to get the government to clean this land," said Stan Louttit, Grand Chief of the Mushkegowuk Council. "These are huge, environmentally sensitive areas. Sites were just left to rot, with heavy equipment and fuel containers left behind. But our people still use this land, so do migratory birds."
With his behind-the-scenes work done, Mr. Louttit looks forward to helping clean the mess. Provincial guidelines will ensure that the company that ultimately wins the contract - the tender closed May 11 - will employ at least 50 first nations workers.
The work itself will be painstaking and labour intensive. The government cleaned two southern sites in 2009 - one between Timmins and Kirkland Lake and the other between Cochrane and Moosonee - in a sort of test run.
Although the sites were small in comparison and didn't have any buildings, the soil was heavily contaminated. The less-polluted soil was sent to a mine in Sudbury to be spread over a tailings pond; anything with dangerously high levels of PCBs was shipped to a processing facility in St. Ambrose, Que., where it was cooked in a special container to burn off the chemicals and render the soil inert.
"Logistics will require the use of several modes of transportation, which include air, marine and land including winter cat train and rail," a ministry document warns would-be bidders on the project. "Mobilization/demobilization of main base camps and off-site removal of waste require a combination of deep sea marine shipping/shallow draft barges and air transportation for crew shift rotations.
Mr. Cantan said when the work is done, the land should be restored to its original state. "To finish up the other sites, we brought in some clean soil. We planted some trees and spread some seeds," he said. "But it's far more complicated up north, right on the very edge of Ontario. These sites were not all created equal."
Native leaders vow to continue monitoring the sites, many of which are used as hunting camps throughout the year. They know that while the work will be done in a few years, it could be several more decades before the land is returned to its natural state.
"Nobody was willing to take up this fight," said Mr. Louttit. "Now that we've gotten this far, it isn't likely we are going to stop paying attention."