The old Snag airstrip, abandoned for years, was cleaned up over the summer, at a cost of about a million dollars.

During World War II, Snag, located east of Beaver Creek, was a staging base for military planes being ferried north to Alaska and Russia. When the military pulled out, they left behind their garbage, including lead, PCBs, and chemicals used for pest control.

"There were quite large volumes of everything," says Mark Palmer, manager of contaminants and waste site clean-up programs for the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. In all, 150 cubic metres of lead and the defoliant chlordane were removed, as well as 40 cubic metres of PCBs.

The clean-up was conducted under the federal government's Arctic Environmental Strategy (AES), part of the Green Plan, and in co-operation with the White River and Kluane First Nations. Most of the work was done by members of the two First Nations.

"It's being cleaned up to residential-parklands standards because they're putting a healing centre out there," Palmer says.

Although the most dangerous waste is now gone, there is still a large landfill of low-level debris at Snag.

"We'll encapsulate it, put it in a geotech liner, cover it up, fence it, and just leave it as federal land forever," says Palmer. "You'd be talking about millions of dollars to dispose of it, and it would have gone into a landfill down south, just like this."

With a waste site inventory running into the hundreds, Palmer and his colleagues have to weigh the costs of clean-up against the danger a site poses and the limited resources available.

The Venus Mine, in the southwest Yukon, is an example of the dilemma. The long-abandoned mine and its toxic arsenic tailings were cleaned up in 1995.

"We capped it in place and isolated it from the environment," Palmer says. The federal government will remain responsible for the site and will monitor it indefinitely to be sure the tailings are not leaking out.

The cost of the solution was close to $1.6 million. To remove the tailings and treat them would have cost tens of millions of dollars, money that might have been spent on health or education or other clean-up.

"You have to balance off cost with common sense," Palmer says.

DIAND is helped in its balancing act by the Yukon Waste Steering Committee, which includes representatives of Environment Canada, the Yukon Chamber of Mines, First Nations, the Yukon government, the Yukon Conservation Society, and other interested parties.

The committee reviews draft work plans and helps decide which sites will be attended to first. Setting priorities by consensus has been a key to the success of the waste clean-up program, Palmer says.

At the beginning of the program, DIAND conducted an inventory that identified about 800 waste sites in the Yukon. Some are as insignificant as an old car rusting in the bush or half a dozen empty barrels. Others require a huge investment to clean up.

Half of the sites originally identified have already been cleaned up. The remaining 400 were surveyed over the summer of 1996 to identify what work must still be done.

The money for the survey and for the clean-up work to date came from the federal government's Green Plan, which terminates on March 31, 1997. However, DIAND has already made a commitment to continue the waste site clean-up program.

"We don't exactly know the commitment level yet," says Palmer, "but at least we know we'll be here to continue doing it."

For more information about contaminated sites in the Yukon, see the Yukon State of the Environment Report 1995, available from Environment Canada in Whitehorse, or contact the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Whitehorse, at 667-3100.