1986-1990 Mining EIS WRST Landcover
Rosenkrans D and Rosenkrans DS. 1990. 1986-1990 Mining EIS WRST Landcover
In 1984, WRST began a multi-year effort to locate, identify and remove hazardous wastes (HWI) on national park service lands. An offshoot of HWI was the barrel inventory and removal program with the goal of eliminating all unmodified barrels from NPS lands in order to improve the aesthetic quality of the Park/Preserve and to eliminate potential toxic waste incidents. Most affected sites consisted of small fuel caches from abandoned mining operations. Inventory efforts (noting and recording the presence, condition, size, distribution, fluid volume and labels of barrels, in addition to conducting level I hazardous waste surveys at each location) continued for nearly a decade; in 1993, serious cleanup efforts began. In all, 52 sites were visited with 41 of these found to contain barrels, drums, and/or batteries including 506 55-gallon drums, 287 5-gallon barrels, and 46 1-gallon cans. The most effort of all occurred in 1995 when WRST concentrated its staging and removal activities in the four main areas of Nabesna, Chokosna, Ptarmigan Lake and May Creek. Barrels were eventually transported out of the area via helicopter, fixed wing aircraft, and flat bed trucks to aproved toxic waste handling facilities for disposal. As a result of this major and costly effort, WRST adopted a new policy which limits fuel caches to less than 30 gallons on NPS lands and outright prohibited the use of 55-gallon barrels for storage. The new policy was intended to reduce the potential for spills, and in case of abandonment, make cleanup efforts by NPS substantially easier.
- Type
- Geospatial Dataset
- Authors
- Rosenkrans, Danny; Rosenkrans, Danny
- Date of Issue
- 1990
- Units
- CAKN , WRST
- Keywords
- Botany, Contaminants/Hazardous Mat., DatasetCatalog, Plants, Wrangell - St Elias National Park, WRST