Spangdahlem, Germany is the location of Spangdahlem Air Base, a NATO facility built in 1950 located in western Germany, just a hop, skip, and jump from Luxembourg. In 2009, when I visited for work, it housed, or at least accepted, numerous C-130 from Ramstein Air Base, Germany. I'm not sure, but F-16 Fighting Falcons of the 52nd Fighter Wing may have been based at Spang at this time as well. In 2022, F-35A Lightning II fighters were moved to Spang in response to Russian invasion of Ukraine. I actually stayed in the village of Dudeldorf, immediately west of Spang.

St. Lawrence Island was the site of a defense related facility during the start of the Cold War with USSR. On the northeastern end of an island at the southern entrance to the Bering Sea is the Northeast Cape White Alice site. During the 1950s, the US and Canada (DEW Line) built a string of radar and communication antennae array outposts (White Alice Communication {WAC}) ringing the Arctic all pointed towards the territory of the USSR. Their purpose was to track Soviet planes, potential ICBM launches, interface with the Ballistic Missile Early Warning Site at Clear Air Force Station (Alaska) and communicate the information back to relay stations and ultimately to NORAD headquarters in Colorado. Northeast Cape White Alice was built in 1957 and in service on February 17, 1958 and housed both WAC and Aircraft Control and Warning (AC&W) system. From Northeast Cape, Nome is 126 miles away, across the ocean, while the distance from the western end of St Lawrence Island to Chukostk Peninsula, Russia is 40 miles. The distance to medical care and limited supplies accessible only by barge, boat or aircraft, and only weather permitting passage.

The base operated until 1972. Essentially, the launch and subsequent development of satellite telecommunications technology (Telstar, 1962) through the 1960s, and especially the launch of SATCOM in 1973, made the White Alice Communication sites obsolete tech. It is an example of a technology that evolved so rapidly that its development, achievement peak, and obsolescence occurred within 10 years. But the impacts to the environment were significant. In the winter of 1969, so the story goes, the driver of the snow clearing bulldozer accidentally pierced one of the aboveground storage tanks (see pictures above) and an estimated 180,000-gallon diesel fuel release ensued. It wasn't until 2008 that the buildings were demolished (and taken off-island) under the Formerly Used Defense Sites program. In 2009, I was at the site the immediately after July 4th to conduct pilot study efforts related to treatment of diesel impacts to the subsurface.

My time on St Lawrence was split between working in a portable lab space we built and implementing our pilot study in the field. The remainder, what little of it was left, I used to walk the Island areas surrounding our camp. It was the transformation from barren to a sudden spring that seemingly lasted just a few days before the area was covered in flowers and growing things.