70 Years’ Worth of Waste Has Remote Region Over a Barrel

ANADYR, Russia —  If the people of the Chukotka peninsula ever wanted a symbol for their land, the choice would be obvious. Forget the reindeer. Forget the walrus and the frozen tundra. It would have to be the rusty fuel drum.

Across the Bering Sea from Alaska, the huge peninsula is a spectacularly scenic region with icy peaks, vast treeless plains and a big litter problem. Strewn across the landscape like so many empty beer cans are nearly 2 million discarded, 3-foot-tall metal barrels.

The region gives new meaning to the word “wasteland.”

For 70 years, the 53-gallon barrels filled with fuel have been imported from the “mainland”--as the inhabitants call the rest of Russia--and delivered to far-flung settlements on the peninsula by ship, helicopter and sled. Their contents--gasoline, diesel and kerosene--are used to heat homes and to power cars, boats and the all-terrain vehicles that tear across the tundra.

Typically, the barrels are abandoned in the spot where they surrender their last drops of fuel.

The drums pile up outside buildings and on the outskirts of towns. They lie by the roads and in the wilds of the tundra. They are left in streams and rivers and sit on the seashore, rising and falling with the tide. Most are covered with snow in the winter. But when summer arrives, they pop back up like wildflowers in a meadow.

Because of the extreme cold, they decay slowly. The first drums arrived in the 1920s--not long after the Bolshevik Revolution--and some are still around, gradually rusting.

“The Soviet years left us 1.7 million barrels transported to the region from the mainland,” Chukotka Gov. Alexander Nazarov said. “Now these barrels are scattered all over and create a lot of problems.”

Some people have come up with creative uses for the drums.

Standing on end, the barrels are strong enough to serve as foundations for shacks and shanties. Stuck together with concrete, they can become the walls and roofs of buildings.

In areas that face power shortages, they can be turned into wood-burning stoves. In the snowy winters, they are handy as roadside markers. Where the ground is rocky, they can be used as bases for small power poles. At the seashore, they can make floats for rafts.

With the ends cut out, they can be welded, end to end, to make roadway drainage pipes. Cut in half lengthwise, they make decent planters. Or they can be used to protect exposed heating ducts that run through the villages.

A few people have even discovered a recreational use: barrel rolling in the potholed streets of town.

Despite the possibilities, the supply overwhelms the demand.

While appearances may be deceiving, Nazarov said his administration has begun to clean up the mess. The chief method is to squash the drums, stack them up and wait until winter to haul them away on sleds.

“For three years in a row, we are very active in cleaning the area of this waste,” the governor said.

Unfortunately, no one in Chukotka has yet come up with a really good idea of how to use 1.7 million squashed metal barrels. Shipping them to some other part of Russia where the metal can be recycled would be very expensive.

Even now, according to the governor’s figures, there are an average of 16.2 empty barrels for every person in Chukotka--far more than the average of 1.4 reindeer per capita.

Nazarov says there are still places to go in Chukotka where no person has ever set foot. But it is more likely to arrive at a remote destination and find that someone has already been there--and left behind a fuel drum.

The biggest offenders have been the all-terrain vehicles that can go almost anywhere over the tundra. They are big enough to carry several drums to fuel their travels and, of course, they discard their empties on the ground.