Former military site cleaned up

The cleanup of contaminated soil and asbestos at the Kittigazuit military site near Tuktoyaktuk, which began three years ago, is finally complete.

The Northwest Territories base was built in 1947 as a long-range navigation site.

After it was closed in 1950, the federal government used it as a waste metal depot.

Department of Indian and Northern Affairs official Emma Pike says the cleanup took longer than expected because there was more contamination than they thought.

"In the initial assessment the one information gap was the degree of contaminated soils in terms of hydrocarbons so when we were cleaning up some of the metal-contaminated soils we actually found some additional hydrocarbonated soils," says Pike.

"This is fairly common in remediation projects where once you start digging you actually have a bit of a bigger problem than you initially thought."

Pike says now the department is turning its attention to Atkinson Point, a former DEW line site about 80 kilometres from Tuktoyaktuk.

She says work will begin once a remediation plan is developed. That's expected to take about a year.