Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Investigators have discovered asbestos littering an open dump at McMurdo
Station, an American research base in Antarctica. The station’s health and
safety directors have declared the landfill site a hazard and closed it
until the asbestos can be removed or stabilised.

The discovery was made in January by a team from the government’s Argonne
National Laboratory, says Jack Ditmars of Argonne. The National Science
Foundation (NSF), which operates McMurdo, hired the team to track and characterise
waste and pollutants that have accumulated at the base.

‘We have no idea how much asbestos there is,’ says Tom Forham, director
of health and safety for the NSF’s Antarctic programme. The asbestos comes
from discarded construction materials, demolished buildings and insulation
from pipes.

According to Forham, asbestos that is ‘capped’ in the dump by other
materials may not be removed, but will be stabilised instead. ‘Removing
it could be more of a hazard than leaving it,’ he says.

The landfill, at a site known as Fortress Rock, has long been the source
of complaints by environmental pressure groups. Waste has traditionally
been burned at the site in open fires, a practice which prompted the Environmental
Defense Fund to threaten the NSF with a lawsuit last year.

The discovery of asbestos seems to have convinced the NSF to act. A
recent NSF work plan states that the asbestos made ‘remediation of the landfill
site a top priority’.

Forham says the NSF is building an ‘interim’ incinerator at McMurdo
to replace open burning at Fortress Rock. It will burn food and ‘domestic’
waste produced by McMurdo’s staff, whose numbers reach about 1200 during
the summer. Other waste will be removed from the Antarctic. NSF officials
may eventually build a permanent incinerator at the site.

Asbestos is considered a hazardous air pollutant. Dumping material containing
asbestos in landfills is not illegal, but dumps must be ‘qualified’ to accept
such material, according to rules governing waste. Landfills containing
asbestos must be covered with soil or vegetation, says Scott Throwe of the
Environmental Protection Agency.

The cleanup of McMurdo and other bases operated by the US began two
years ago with a budget of $8 million. This year the budget has reached
$25.3 million. NSF has already replaced about 10 kilometres of hose to stem
fuel leaks, characterised the contents of the waste stream from the base,
and removed several hundred drums of hazardous waste. Banks have been built
around a hazardous waste storage site to divert snow melt from the dump.
Much more needs to be done, says Forham, including removing hundreds of
barrels of frozen urine. ‘It was sloppy,’ Forham says of the station’s condition,
‘but it’s not so bad now.’