Incoherency Manifest: Barrel Beaches

Hello! I know I have not written in a good while, but recently I have been encouraged by some new friends to continue writing again so please excuse this rougher 1st piece back while I find my paces again, enjoy!

It’s been a long time since I sat down and began to write something that was for more than just my own eyes, but it doesn’t mean my fingers have been idle. The last real piece of public writing I did was about the scars of concrete that we leave behind us. But the more and more I read about the toll of modern imperialism and the industry that it brings to far flung places the more I discover that concrete is only one part of the damage. Let us examine the humble and dependable metal barrel, an object so mundane that has permanently destroyed ecosystems and been left to rot across our world, how it came to be in such remote places and why it was not removed and the impact it leaves today.

If you haven’t read my older article, which truth be told I do not blame you, its been over a year. In “Concrete Scars”, I spoke about a discovered phenomena I coined through my obsession with the cold war and my secondary obsession of Google Earth. At the time, I was learning and reading for the first time about the DEW line in northern Canada, a series of very remote radar sites and how even with some of them shut and destroyed, the concrete pads, their scars on beautiful and idyllic untouched terrain still remained.

Compared to concrete used in war and imperialism, the barrel is an ancient device. When it comes to the foundations of modern day wide spread military presences in far flung places that came to be during the 2nd world war, concrete padding and structures were significantly less common. This is not to dismay the ever present danger and rot of concrete structures in places such as a France, permanently altering the erosion rates of shore lines and valleys or even in the south Pacific where tiny island chains are still dotted with concrete boxes from both sides, now turned into permanent emplacements in an ecosystem, used for bats, for critical long term buildings for indigenous inhabitants. But as a whole, huge theatres of a World war had little to no use of it, and little to no visual presence today. If you go to remote Alaskan airfields, you will not see a concrete runway. If you turn to Soviet training barracks in the Urals, you will not see a concrete foundation left. But what you may well still see, to this day, is the barrel. Not one, not two but thousands of rusting and rotting metal barrels put into miniature mountains. There must be another distinction made now between the principles of the concrete scars and barrel beaches. The concrete scar is the idea that even after remediation, the act of cleaning of the terrain around old sites, the concrete scar still persists in its beautiful landscape. It’s often not damaging to the terrain around it and thus left to be idle, like a scar. The barrel is a danger. It is a harm and a permanent wound upon a landscape. These barrels harm in compounding ways. It does not take a genius to guess what they were used for, often heavy oils such as diesel for machines on runway maintenance, or worse, AVgas and other aviation fuels which are famously persistent chemicals. These barrels are a ticking time bomb. Depending on their location, it might be months or decades before protective paint peels and the metal finally rusts and lets small amounts of residue into its soil. In places like Bluie East Two,  you’d be shocked with Greenlandic winters, snow fall is less than you’d expect, meaning that these barrels will take years and years before the seep into the soil. The rust destroys the dirt and the moss, the oil leaks into the ground water and eventually into streams and slowly into glacial systems.

But why? Why are these here, and why are they left? And why is it so widespread? Starting with the aforementioned Bluie East Two (hereon referred to as just Bluie for brevity), Bluie came to be during the end of the second world war and more prominently the uneasy peace that succeeded it. When the Nazis finally ate rocks in 1945, the Americans had established a series of air routes to ferry aircraft from the lower 48 to every part of the globe. From New England to England, or Seattle to Siberia, the early stages of recognizable international air travel was unfolding in real time thanks to uncle Sam. One of the most prevalent of these air routes was the north Atlantic air ferry route which flew smaller aircraft from the eastern seaboard up to Newfoundland and the full service American air force bases on (future) Canadian soil, McAndrew and Ernest Hammond onto Greenland if needed, then another full stop in Iceland before touching down in the British Isles. Unlike Iceland, which is and was at the time, a more developed region with full aircraft serviceability, the Bluie system was a series of ‘Just In Case’ airfields. Imagine you’re flying a bucket of bolts built and held together by nothing besides a hate for fascism and maybe some internal nationalistic racism, you might also want a place to set down in between A and B with a freezing cold ocean between you. Hence Bluie came to be.

Its history is remarkably boring otherwise, boats show up, build a basic runway, a few hangars that aren't meant to last forever, and most importantly bring a small hasemite kingdom’s worth of oil to fuel up those gas guzzling engines. As such, you have 10 years of irregular number of visits, filling up, leaving, with little resupply efforts besides more fuel. On top of that, this place is out of mind, but more so very out of sight. Foreign soil makes it less your problem “apparently”. Thus when Bluie closed, they took the planes and left everything else. Trucks, buildings, rations and most importantly those damn barrels.

Since the Americans left in 1947, no one has come back to clean up.

This piece isn’t called Bluie though, because it isn’t limited. Turning to the east, its equally obvious that the Americans aren’t guilty alone. Stories have circled across the internet for decades now of decay in the Russia Far East. How after the Soviets fell, various settlements were fully abandoned. These were not exaggerations, if anything they don’t show a full story of how long the rot has come to last.

In a similar vein to many American imperialism steps into the arctic regions, Wrangel Island was only ever settled in earnest very recently, in the mid 1920s by Soviets and in earnest the 60s at a newly created settlement of Zvodnyy. With its creation, Zvodnyy had an incredibly limited presence both physically and in time, being abandoned only a decade later and a small handful of residents moving back to the continental USSR. But during its active time, the Soviets were dedicated, they brought in huge amounts of provisions, and once again fuel for airlifts and helicopters to this remote station. When the people left, like Bluie and so many others, the food was eaten fast (this case by some unfriendly bears) and the barrels of leftover fuel left to rot and pollute what eventually becomes one of the world's most remote and untouched nature preserves in the world.

Why not do something? 

Why not clean up or at least attempt to do something. Like our concrete scars, we know that it's not impossible to remediate the ground and return it to its original state. In one case that is often not known and where I personally learnt the term barrel beach and came to embrace it is that of the town of Kuujjuaq, once known as Fort Chimo. A remote settlement (as always) located in the Nunavik region of Quebec, sitting right on the arctic ocean, closer to territory of Nunavut than it is to its owners in Quebec city. Like so many other places, Kuujuaq was once the site of a military presence, and in addition, a trading post by the Hudson’s Bay Company (rest in piss). It had an even more short-lived American presence when they also built its airfield for ferry routes, in this time which never came to be, but the fuel that started coming in never stopped as the north developed and people lived before, then and continue to live in the area surrounding Kujjuaq. As planes flew in, barrels came too, fueled and then dumped onto its river’s shore. While the rot started, it also stopped. Unfortunately the answer is straight forward in a bad way. It got into someone's line of sight. Kuujjuaq wasn’t ignorable, Nunavik has an economic output that isn’t ignorable and the people rightfully complained to the south. The barrels were a danger to those living immediately next to them and as such the government was thankfully forced to take action and remediate the beach. Thus after decades and decades of pollution, these barrels were finally cleared and up and sent south to be disposed of properly.

The barrel beach is more than just this short history of a few places. It is more a fable or tale now lost to living memory, a warning to heed in the most remote places in the world are delicate and that our arrogance and especially our own work and its impact on the world below us.

Thanks for reading my article! If you liked my writing and or are curious more about what I talk about, check out my newsletter Incoherency Manifest! You can find it best at https:// incoherencymanifest.beehiiv.com/ I promise (maybe) I’ll write more soon!