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The Current Transcript for February 26, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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VOICE 1: If somebody told me there was this much water I would never believe them. You should have seen the river yesterday. It was like a freight train.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Another river, another thaw, another incessant rain, and yet another neighbourhood finds itself fighting unexpected floodwaters. The person you just heard is in Chatham, Ontario still in a state of emergency. But what happened there this weekend is emblematic of volatile changes related to everything from fast-rising river waters, unseasonable torrential rains, and shifting situations on floodplains — affecting people from riverside towns to coastal communities. In a moment our project Adaptation hears from an ecologist who says these changes collectively are linked to climate change and are so profound that those working on projections and policies to protect us and our homes aren't convinced they'll find the answers. And while shifting weather patterns threaten to leave some places submerged they are exposing others that were supposed to remain hidden.

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VOICE 1: Nothing lived on the ice cap, not even seal or caribou survived in this climate. Our job was to cross 150 miles of ice much of it split by crevasses and then build a city under the ice.

AMT: The U.S. military had a grand plan back in the late ‘50s and it involved building a secret nuclear weapons base under the Greenland ice — disguised as an unarmed scientific research centre. With Arctic warming that now-abandoned city under the ice is in on track to become a place in the slush. And now there's a disagreement as deep as a Greenland crevice on who should clean it up. We'll tell you more in an hour. Also today, family secrets.

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VOICE 1: I basically learned that my father had been living a double life as a gay man with 13 kids is quite shocking. And especially at 18, that changed our relationship profoundly.

AMT: A story of hidden lives, religious obligation, child abuse, and family ties in half an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Why Canada needs to change how to forecast and prepare for floods

Guests: Gord Miller, Linda Hepner

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VOICE 1: Ah, it's been very scary what's happened down here. The water came up very quickly. And we've been able to save our property but there have been some rescues and there's also a cul-de-sac across the road that's an island. The water, we've never seen it in over 30 years this bad. But so far we've been able to save the house. And it's just very stressful.

AMT: Janet Vanderiviere lives in one of the Chatham, Ontario neighbourhoods hit hardest by flooding over the weekend. Unseasonably, mild temperatures and heavy rainfall created dangerous conditions in several parts of the province last week, and parts of Quebec were on flood watch for the same reason. In Port Bruce, Ontario, truck driver Scott Barber was stranded in the cab of his truck Friday when the bridge he was driving across collapsed into a creek. He spoke with the London Free Press.

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VOICE 1: I was hauling gravel just coming across the bridge — almost made it across the bridge and snapped behind me and I slid back down. Just heard a loud crash and next thing you know I'm in the water. Next thing I know someone's yelling from the bank that they had called 911 and not to move and actually they were pretty quick they got here in less than 10 minutes. Came and got me in a raft and just trying to find the best way to do it. Yeah I was relieved to see dry land.

AMT: Officials said it was too soon to know what caused the bridge to collapse but there were questions about whether the wet conditions being experienced in southwestern Ontario played a part. In Chatham, officials declared a state of emergency on Friday and warned residents to evacuate if necessary as the Thames River that flows through the city swelled. On Saturday, the river reached its highest level since 1970 and overflowed in the downtown core and surrounding areas, causing damage to some homes and businesses and requiring emergency officials to rescue seven people by boat. As Janet said, the community hasn't seen anything like it in decades. CBC reporter Kaitie Fraser has been covering the story.

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[Sound: Water splashing]

REPORTER: Tell me a little bit about the neighbourhood here.

VOICE 1: Oh, well we went through this in '77 when we were little kids over here, and we had to be boated out of the house. And then we had it again back in the ‘80s again. It's kind of devastating when it happens of course, but it's nothing new to us. I mean, you do what you got to do.

AMT: Chatham, Ontario resident Dana Dawson. In a minute, as part of our special series-long project Adaptation, we'll speak with an ecologist who says more flooding and extreme weather is coming to Canada, and there's not much we can do about it. And then we'll hear from a politician in British Columbia whose city has committed $1.5 billion to try. But for the people of Chatham, the question for now is simply: when will the water levels go down? Here's Dana Dawson again. She and her boyfriend, Ivan Skodak, spoke with CBC reporter Kaitie Fraser as they checked in on the home owned by Dawson's father.

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VOICE 1: Luckily the house is dry so that's a good thing.

VOICE 2: Oh yes, the house is dry.

REPORTER: So this little blue house right here, that looks like it's under two feet of water.

VOICE 1: Yeah, that's Tom's garage. There's probably about that much water in there.

VOICE 2: Yeah, that's my dad's garage, his house, and there's no water in the house.

REPORTER: How's your dad feeling today about it?

VOICE 2: Um, I think dad's, he's OK. You know, this is his home, he doesn't like to have to be relocated but he knows you know, you got to do what you got to do. We came here today hoping that he could go in the house but no, they took his meter and they shut the gas off the other day so no, he's not staying here.

REPORTER: When you do look around, um, like what do you think when you look at all the water?

VOICE 1: I think it's incredible, if somebody told me there'd be this much water I wouldn't believe. You should have seen the water yesterday. Today it's calmed down but yesterday it was like a freight train.

VOICE 2: Oh yeah it was vicious out there yesterday, stuff floating by. I think, Ivan, it was moving a lot faster yesterday than it is today. I don't know, it could be a couple days before he's back in here, it could be a week, I don't know, Mother Nature calls you know, what do you do? You just keep going on.

AMT: In the meantime, local officials are reminding everyone there's still a lot of work to be done in the days ahead. Fire Chief Bob Crawford had this message when he spoke to reporters on Saturday.

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VOICE 1: We are still in a response mode, our organization hasn't moved to recovery yet, that's still days away. Remind everybody that we're in a state of emergency here, and we are responding, still responding to calls for service. So we have our dive team out, we are in dry suits; we're helping people make their way to safety. It's obvious people are quite concerned and we all are, it's a tight community here in Chatham-Kent. Safety first, we want to make sure everybody gets through this week ahead of us safely so we don't have any injuries or anybody else hurt, and no loss. Please remember no unattended children around water of course, I know it's really tempting to come and take a look. Keep an eye on your children so that nobody strays into the water. And that goes for our pets as well, don't leave your dog or your cat out anywhere near the water. I can assure you the water is very strong, the pressure is very significant, and the flow rate is very high. We're moving a lot of water at high speed and as strong a swimmer as you think you might be, you don't want to be in that water for any reason.

AMT: Floods are the most costly natural disasters in Canada in terms of property damage. Here's a look at some of the numbers.

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VOICE 1: About 20 per cent of Canadian households are at a high risk of flooding. In 2017, floods caused over $590 million in insured damage across Canada. This doesn't include the financial costs to governments and Canadians without flood insurance. Flooding is now the most costly hazard in terms of urban property damage, surpassing fire and theft as the main source of property insurance claims. Flooding is expected to cost the federal government's disaster assistance fund more than $650 million a year over the next five years.

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AMT: My next guest sympathizes with the personal and financial cost of flooding, but he's not sure there's much we can do about it. Gord Miller is a former environmental commissioner in Ontario. He's also an ecologist and environmental policy analyst. He joins us from North Bay, Ontario.

GORD MILLER: Hello.

AMT: Why are we seeing more of this kind of flooding such as the flooding we're seeing along Ontario rivers right now?

GORD MILLER: Well of course people have to realize we've talked about climate change a lot but what really has happened is that the climate has changed. We could detect it now. The extreme weather events that we used to talk about coming in the future are happening now. The whole pattern of weather have shifted especially in Northern Hemisphere and given us these extreme rainfall events that translate into flooding.

AMT: And what about the predictors that you use to try to see this stuff coming?

GORD MILLER: Well of course for many years people say, 'why didn't we have a big flood problem before?' Well we didn't because for 50 or 60 years the engineers did a great job. They knew the pattern of rainfall events — what we call intensity, duration, and frequency of rainfall events. And they could do statistical calculations. They say 'well here's the size of a culvert we should put under that road or here is the height of the bridge we should make. And here is the size of the floodplain we would expect for a storm once every 100 years'. They had a really good handle on that and they could design things for somewhat predictable — at least statistically predictable climate. But now those numbers are no good anymore because the rainfall is far more intense, has longer duration, and the calculations they use to build things and protect things, aren't valid anymore.

AMT: So are you telling me that we need to change our infrastructure to new calculations?

GORD MILLER: Well I'm saying that the infrastructure we've got built, we built it for climate we no longer have. There really is not enough money to change it all. One has to look at it differently. One has to say, 'OK what are the critical points perhaps?' It may not be obvious. You can't just change all culverts. That would just be too disruptive and way too expensive. But maybe there are some key things that have to be reconsidered and redesigned. Then we have to prepare the community to increase their resilience to this because instead of saying, ‘well we're going to protect you`. You know 30 years ago we can pretty well protect you from flooding. Now we have to say, ‘no we have to make you resilient to the flooding that this ought to the time at any time`.

AMT: In other words we have to protect ourselves.

GORD MILLER: Well yes. But it's a community thing. I mean you heard the fire chief's response. Everybody has got to work together and plan. And you can't take comfort as we did for most of my life that these strange and serious floods won't affect most of us. In fact they're going to affect far more of us than ever before and we can't really predict where and when it's going to happen.

AMT: So you're talking about culverts. Things like culverts and storm sewers. The kind of basic infrastructure things that nobody wants to talk about because they're seen as boring, really part in this

GORD MILLER: That's it. If the culvert under the road isn't big enough that means that the water builds up can't get through and then blasts out the whole road. Then you lose the road. Once you've lost the road there is not going to be a fire truck going down that road or an ambulance or any local traffic. People have sort of heard about the floodplain and in Ontario we have taken a lot of the buildings off the floodplains. But now if you do the recalculation you realize the floodplain that we calculated isn't big enough. So now all of a sudden homes we thought were safe are now at risk because the magnitudes of floods are going to be greater because the magnitude of the rainfall and the duration of rainfalls are increasing.

AMT: Well that has got huge implications, not only for waterfront residential properties, but for farmland then.

GORD MILLER: Oh yeah. And of course the other half of the cycle is that have these longer, more intense rainfalls, and we have correspondingly longer more intense droughts. So the agricultural community has to cope with this too. Although they're a little more resilient and there are more things they can do with the sort of what we call a “built-in environment.” Where we have roads and structures and buildings and sewer pipes — that's the ones that are hardest to change of course.

AMT: But what you seem to be telling me is that even the predictors that you would use in order to adjust as new communities are built or repaired, those predictors aren’t reliable because things are still changing.

GORD MILLER: That's right. You hit the key point. It's not just that the climate has changed; it is changing and continuing to change. So when the engineers try to design new infrastructure, they're doing their best. But their old tools aren’t any good because they don't know if this goes back to a sewer pipe; should it be 24 inches or 36 inches or 48 inches? They are not sure. They will give you their best estimate and they are trying to do the best job. But the reality is five years from now their best guess is no good anymore because the climate continues to change and alter in unpredictable ways.

AMT: So in other words the money that we're spending now and some communities are spending now — are these worthwhile investments?

GORD MILLER: Well you have to your best you can. But it's the way you think about these things. You can't be assured that you're protecting. So let's make sure that we spend money on the main roads where we have to have the ambulances and fire trucks running for instance, right? Let's make sure that we have the main key bridges high enough and strong enough. So you have to think differently about how you plan your structure. For many years we've been really confident that what we were building was going to be safe for 100 years. Now we can't be confident. You've got to be extra cautious and spend extra money in some areas, and then just accept the fact that in other areas they you're never going to be able to protect them. You're just going to have to prepare for the flood.

AMT: What about zoning and development then from community leaders and from elected officials?

GORD MILLER: Oh boy, that's going to be a very controversial one. Any time that you create a bigger floodplain and you tell people their houses are now at-risk of flooding and devalues the housing, it is always very controversial. Yes that's going to happen. Well we saw it in Calgary a few years ago when vast areas that had never flooded before became flooded. And that's the result of the unpredictability of the climate.

AMT: Gold Miller, thanks for your insights into this

GORD MILLER: You're quite welcome.

AMT: Gord Miller is an ecologist, environmental policy analyst and a former environmental commissioner in Ontario. We reached him in North Bay, Ontario. Now to British Columbia where the province has warned municipalities that they better prepare for rising waters in the years to come. One city determined to make sure it has a solid game plan for a watery future is Surrey, BC. To tell us how the city is planning for flooding I am joined by Surrey Mayor Linda Hepner. Hello.

LINDA HEPNER: Morning.

AMT: How vulnerable is Surrey to flooding?

LINDA HEPNER: Surrey manages the largest flood control system of dykes and sea dams in the entire province. So we are very vulnerable. And our planning of over 100 years ago, the features that worked well then, will not protect us and did not anticipate the demands that climate change is bringing.

AMT: So what do you see that needs to be done already for the future?

LINDA HEPNER: Well we need a very strong adaptation plan. And any adaptation plan is going to cost money and significant amounts of money. So what we have done is we're in the process in the final throes of bringing together all of our stakeholders early to proactively look at what adaptation options we have and making sure that our citizens are engaged in that process of recommendations that are reflective of where we know we're going to be headed in the years to come. We've done some assessments that by 2070 all of our dykes will be over-topped multiple times a year which will ultimately result in dykes failure. So we have got to plan and we've got to be at the front end of community resiliency, safety and health. So there is a lot of work yet to be done. But we know that in some cases; I'm going to use the world "manage retreat" is probably going to have to be an option.

AMT: What does that mean?

LINDA HEPNER: That means that there will be some areas where we can do some greater dyke control that will be very expensive and some sea damming that will be very expensive. And some areas where we can look at options like creating barriers or small islands as it comes towards our coast. But there will be other areas where it simply will not hold and will have to over a course of years manage the retreat of either farmland where salinization will become an issue and we won't be able to use those lands the way we are using them today and they simply won't exist.

AMT: This is tough stuff for elected officials because it gets political. These are tough decisions.

LINDA HEPNER: It's very tough. But it's the reality that we live in. And making sure that we bring our residents along as we're developing our plan is really fundamentally important. Our residents have very well received the kind of process we're going through and I think that is critical to those that are looking at adaptation plans. One third of our land in Surrey is agriculture. I've got communities that are right on the forefront around Mud Bay and Crescent Beach. We look at the federally protected areas and flyway — we're in the Pacific Flyway that could very well be under water. All of those things are scary. But adaptation measures are going to be the only way that we can mitigate some of the issues and some of them as your former guest was saying will not even be able to be mitigated

AMT: And you are one municipality. You have First Nations areas involved there. How much help are you getting from the province and federal government?

LINDA HEPNER: Well the province has clearly told us that we need to make adaptation plans that will plan for at least one metre of sea level rise by 2100 and two metres sea level rise by 2200. But in terms of how we're going to do that? We have to come up with the plan and then we'll process our plan options with those governments that are more senior than local in terms of what it's going to cost because it is not going to be able to be absorbed by a local government.

AMT: Do you have any ballpark figures of what that could mean?

LINDA HEPNER: Our current estimate is about $1.5 billion to adapt.

AMT: And if you don't?

LINDA HEPNER: There will be some very disruptive and costly issues because the cost of not investing will be far more damaging and far more disruptive.

AMT: Linda Hepner, thanks for sharing your insights into what your community has to do. Interesting. Thank you.

LINDA HEPNER: Thank you. It's a long road but everybody has to pull together because it's here and it's on the ground today.

AMT: OK. Well thanks again.

LINDA HEPNER: Thank you.

AMT: That is Linda Hepner. She is is the mayor of Surrey. And that is where we reached her. Let us know what you think of what our guests are saying today. You can find us on Twitter we are @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook or go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. What is your community doing to try to prepare for what is obviously a huge change coming, especially communities along rivers or along the coastline? The CBC News is next. Then, a young woman breaks free of the tangled web of family lies and secrets. She shares her story right after the news. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast, and on your radio app.

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Coming out to her strict Catholic dad, Tina Alexis Allen discovers a life-changing secret

Guest: Tina Alexis Allen

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AMT: Still to come…

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VOICE 1: This is the story of Camp Century, the city under ice.

AMT: Not anymore. America's toxic military waste breaks through Greenland's melting ice. But first, a daughter reveals a secret to her father, and gets a life-changing secret in return.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: How dare we complain about the hot sun or your poor sore feet or there's too much garlic in the tabbouleh. My fellow pilgrims this was pain. Some 20 years ago, you might be interested in knowing, that my wife Anne, a nurse in the American army, and I, a British officer, met here for the grace of God, as we both were just passing through. Our first date? Walking the Stations of the Cross.

AMT: That's Tina Alexis Allen, on stage, playing her father Sir John in her one-woman play about his life. Sir John was a dominant — and dominating — force in the childhoods of Tina and her 12 older siblings. A man with a booming British voice, who ran a Catholic travel agency and had been knighted by a Pope. In a loud, rambunctious family, Tina grew up holding secrets she was afraid to tell her very religious parents. And when those secrets began to spill out she discovered that she'd have to hold on to her father's secrets as well. Tina Alexis Allen is an actor and screenwriter. She works under this name, but it's not the name she had growing up. She is the author of Hiding Out: A Memoir of Drugs, Deception and Double Lives. And she joins us from New York. Hello.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Good morning. How are you?

AMT: Well I'm well and I'm really curious. So in that clip that you're playing your dad and they walk the Stations of the Cross. You're talking about the Old City of Jerusalem. They walked the Station of the Cross on their first date.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Yes, I know. It sounds a little heavy [laughs]. But actually my parents were both very devout Catholics. And my mother was a nurse in the American army and my dad a British officer as I said. My dad was going to be a priest and she was visiting Jerusalem and heard there is this British to be priest who knows a lot about Jerusalem and he would be able to give you sort of a tour. And she and a couple fellow nurses joined him and that was their first date

AMT: And in that clip your dad is leading a group of tourists and talking to them. What was it like travelling with him and with your whole family?

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: It was crowded and busy [laughs]. I remember once we went to New York on an early, early trip — well actually I don't exactly remember this happening but it's known in my family. And we came to New York. I was a child — maybe six. And they thought we were maybe an orphanage because people didn't necessarily see 15 people of kids and we were one right after the other. So there are 13 kids in 15 years. So we were always a bit of a spectacle. But he always had access. He always had the ability to get us where we needed to be. But it was fun. We went to Rome as a family in '76 and had an audience with the Pope and we kind of took over the town and went to Esquina and I think we took over a whole hotel. So it was always fun and games in addition to the drama [laughs].

AMT: Right. And you mention there was always money. For such a big family your father was running a very successful business.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Yeah. I mean he did have a successful travel agency. But we always mused even in the early days like around the dining room table when he was off travelling like, "Mom, where do you think all the money comes from? Like how is it that we're all in private school and we have a pool? It's like he's a travel agent. He's not running a media conglomerate. So what is it?” So it was muse but never sort of went past that. But of course as the book reveals I start to uncover more facts about actually the secret double life that he was living.

AMT: Well we'll get to that. But let's talk a little bit more about you being a girl. How did you view your dad when you were a girl?

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: You know Anna Maria I did not like my dad to be perfectly frank. He wasn't always the nicest guy at home despite the fact that he was a good man in the world and did a lot of good for people. He was challenging at home to me, to my siblings, and especially to my mother. And I adored my mother. So no kid wants to see one of their parents being mistreated. I was kind of a tomboy tough kid and I loved her and she didn't quite know how to maybe defend herself very well. She was a bit passive and so me and other siblings. But I remember speaking up to my dad and sort of trying to be brave and stick up for her

AMT: You describe what I interpreted it as rather cruel relationship at times. He would berate her and she would just softly kind of put her head down or just take it and there was that quietness and sort of accepting that she was lesser than.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I think my mother had a very hard time saying no. As a child that was hard. In fact I remember thinking to myself like consciously in my early late teens, 20s, like I just said, "I'm never going to be like my mom or I'm never going to be married to someone like my dad because it was so painful to watch." As I've gotten older I have to say that had my mother been a fighter which is probably what she would have needed to do maybe to change something, I'm not sure, it may have just added more chaos. I think she felt with 13 kids she probably didn't really have anywhere to go. She loved her kids and she also had deep, deep faith and believed in marriage. All those things combined made it quite complicated. And yeah I think cruel is an accurate word. He would be very cruel to her.

AMT: Let's jump ahead to your late teenage years. You're out to lunch with your father at his club when one of your secrets is revealed. He guesses it actually. What happened?

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: I had a girlfriend at the time. I was 18. Secretly. She was 12 years my senior and no one knew. I had dated guys and girls. But this was where I was at that point in my life. And my dad was going to send me to Greece. I was on a full basketball scholarship at the University of Maryland. And I think he thought let me give her something to celebrate that. Anyway I asked if I could bring a friend — the friend being my secret girlfriend. And we had lunch, the three of us to discuss the itinerary. And in that conversation after a bit of alcohol he basically said he knew. He knew about us. He picked up on it. You know he just basically outed us and then he proceeded to say, "I buried my lover in the war." And that went on to be clarified when I choked on whatever I was eating that it was a soldier named Omar and I basically learned that my father had been living a double life as a gay man with 13 kids which is quite shocking and especially at 18 and that changed our relationship profoundly.

AMT: He told you about other relationships as well. You had a godfather.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Yeah. Yeah. My godfather when I was born he was stationed in Germany. And my father and he were together I think for a number of years. And my father revealed that and relationships that he had with clergy. I mean it's complicated. You couldn't believe it if it weren't true.

AMT: Yeah on the surface this is a man with 13 kids and a devout Catholic following all of the Catholic doctrine.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Oh yeah. I mean we said the rosary every night on our knees in front of the crucifix. You know we were the quintessential large Catholic family in the ‘70s and ‘80s. So there was certainly hypocrisy. Yeah he went to daily mass and was devoted to the Vatican and to the church. How he consolidated it? I'm not exactly sure. But I learned a lot playing him in that solo show and that was my intent to understand him and that complexity.

AMT: After you both know each other's secrets you actually talk about how you go forward. What do you decide? What does he tell you?

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Well he basically — I guess we kind of make a pack or he makes the pack. I was always afraid of him in addition to loving him so much or at least it didn't feel like that. But it changed because I became his confidant. And to be fair in a way he became mine although I didn't still trust him enough to really share feelings. But what I was able to do was have someone in the family that now knew my secret. And that was a big relief. So in a strange way we probably helped each other. And yet it was clearly difficult and complicated to initially get my arms around my father is lying to my mother; now I am lying to my mother more than just me. I mean I've been lying to my mother since I was 11 and having complicated traumatic situations going on in my life I was you know keeping secrets then. But now it was about my dad. You know and that changed things. It was bittersweet.

AMT: Well let's talk about what happened when you were 11.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Yeah. Well so essentially I guess I would say I was sexualized very young and I came of age at lightning speed. I was not your average 11-year-old and by the time I was in middle school there was a female teacher who took me under her wing and then that turned into a sexual relationship. I say with air quotes you can't see me but I say in air quotes "relationship" because I'm clear that that wasn't a relationship. Certainly it wasn't anything I condone. But it did go on and it felt in some ways probably that that little girl of 11 that it was better than where she was at. Because along with the teacher came attention, came warm arms, came gifts, and came being the apple of someone's eye. You know she was the cool teacher. Again, you know like really complicated. And yet for where I was with the context of having the home life I did my 11-year-old self didn't feel like necessarily there was something wrong even though I knew from this teacher in my own life by 11, 12, or 13 that it had to be a secret like because she would say, “No one's going to understand this.” Well of course they wouldn't. But for a different reason she was implying.

AMT: I mean really in any other world this is straight up sexual abuse of a child what your teacher did to you.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: It is absolutely sexual abuse. I actually wrote an essay for Psychology Today recently because I wanted to specifically address how I came to terms with calling it sexual abuse, how long it took me, a level of sort of brainwash that I felt I might have been under and protecting her and protecting myself maybe from coming to terms with the fact that it wasn't pure love — it was abuse. And there were so many other ways she could have helped me that didn't involve sex frankly. In the book as a young voice which is how the book is told I haven't come to terms with that yet. So I want the readers to be clear that I'm not condoning this. I just wasn’t in a place in my early 20s and at 18 to have labelled it what it was.

AMT: How old were you when you came to grips with that, Tina?

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: I was probably the age she was when it started and that's kind of how it came about. I think is that I got to be 27. And my life you know the onion was starting to peel. I was starting to reveal more secrets. I got into therapy. I mean I've had many, many years of healing to get to this place. But I think when I got to 27 I was like, "You know what? I would never do this." Like I looked at an 11-year-old and I go, "Oh. That's what this was.”

AMT: Well let's talk a little bit more about what was then going on in your life. On the surface again, this big Catholic family. You find out your father's secret and you end up going to gay clubs with him.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Yeah. I mean it got pretty crazy. We would go to clubs. A lot of alcohol. My dad was a big drinker. One of his greatest tragic flaw. Sadly never got help around that. I think it would have gone a long way. But nevertheless he was drowning I'm sure a lot of feelings, guilt, shame, and all the other. But yeah at that point in my early 20s we started hitting the bars secretly. I remember being in Paris and going to some underground clubs and definitely in Dupont Circle in Washington D.C. Yeah we became sort of like drinking buddies I guess would be the best way to say it. And yet it did give me a father that I never had even though the price was high. I think for me at that point that's how I consolidated it is that I now had his attention. I never felt special to him. But now I was.

AMT: But you had it attention 'cause you had a secret saying he was picking up sex partners in the bars.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Yeah. I definitely watched him cruise. And frankly even though I say all that I've said about yeah there was the benefit of having his attention — those moments were not easy.

AMT: It wouldn't be easy if you were watching a heterosexual parent do that.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. It has nothing to do with the sexuality. It didn't for me at all. It's just that you know you're 18. You don't want to watch your parent do that. I probably drank it away, drugged it away, looked away, and excused it away, but it wasn't easy

AMT: And on another level. You're keeping this from your mother who you have seen as someone suffering but who is deeply religious.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Yeah. The sadness that I may still carry around some of this probably will always be about my mom because as I said I adored my mother and yet I think I got it that that wasn't going to be a safe place to go to share my sexuality. I didn't think I'd have her approval. I think that was clear. Now I've got my dad's secret. So I think the guilt built. But there was no way I was going there — until I did [laughs].

AMT: Exactly. So what happened? How did all those secrets get out?

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: I think I had a breaking point: the drinking, the drugging, the partying, and the secrets. The lies, more than anything, the lies that I had to tell – not had to but I was telling — that now including my dad. I just feel like the breaking point came. My mother was kind of actually putting a little bit of pressure on me which wasn't her style. She was very gentle. And yet she was feeling it. I don't know about my dad but she was feeling the level of partying I was doing. I was still at home in the summer so she'd see me come in or not come in. And she was worried and she was sort of starting to put pressure on me that I had never experienced. Questions and I'm worried about you and you should spend time with people your own age and all this sort of thing. And one night I came in and I just I broke down and I revealed in a sort out well indirect way but as best I could at that time that I had been with women. And then that sort of was the beginning of a snowball of the rest of the house of cards I guess coming down. And then my sister asked questions based on what I told my mother. She asked me questions and then I started actually telling the truth.

AMT: You had a lot of people angry with you by then.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Yeah. When I did my solo show that was about five years ago I started developing it and I got a lot of flak from less than half. But you know a handful of siblings just were outraged that I was going to speak about all the sides of my father as opposed to maybe just this holy man that a lot of people saw him as.

AMT: Well he was really angry with you, was he not? When he realized that you had admitted to your sister that he was having relationships with men.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Oh the wrath of God. Oh yeah. And I'm sure it did feel like a betrayal. And yet any therapist would tell you that was the right thing to do. But on the flip side of it who my father was in his shoes I'm sure he saw it as a complete betrayal.

AMT: How did your mother react to the news of your dad?

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: I think she was pretty floored. My mother claims to not have known anything. I think it's hard to be married to someone and not have picked up clues. I think she had definite clues. But I think at this point there was no more hiding. There was no more I can put up with this. And so initially I think she was I'm sure in shock and deep pain. But beautifully my mother actually got into therapy and that was a really wonderful thing. And even though my parents believe it or not ended up together my mom took some time for herself which she had never done. You know we were her life.

AMT: Now you said they went back to each other. But she kicked him out at one point.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Oh yes. She left the house. She went away for a while and then she kicked him out of the house. She wanted him out. She took a stand. The right stand of course. Any human being would need to do that to catch their breath and process. And she absolutely did. It was a breaking point for her too. Yeah I've had guilt about it at times you know looking back thinking well if I hadn't said anything. But of course that's not who I am. You know it had to happen and it probably was going to happen one day.

AMT: At some point in all of this you had a lot of questions about what your dad was really doing beyond his sex life. What was he really doing with the Vatican? Why was he so well-connected? Where did all that money come from? What did you learn?

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Well I've learned quite a bit. I've learned quite a bit in the last few years. I think there was always some musing about does dad work for the Vatican because we saw the connections. He's a Catholic travel agent. So why does he have access and have regular meetings with the papal nuncio of Italy. His travel habits were extreme even for a travel agent. Things like dad went to 19 countries in 21 days. My assessment is that it was career Vatican work, probably passing messages, maybe money. You know I've seen briefcase of money. So something's going on. He also always was loaded with $100 bills.

AMT: This was during the Cold War, wasn't it?

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Exactly. Yes. And that's where I believe he started because he was in Russia in the ‘50s. You know Americans were not in Russia. And what was he doing in Russia? Not selling you know pilgrimages to the Kremlin. The way that he travelled. He also never travelled with luggage. No matter if he was going for two days or two months. And he had a Vatican passport which I don't know how you explain that. I'm trying to find out why.

AMT: Eventually you start talking about this. Your parents have both passed away.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Yes.

AMT: Where are they buried?

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: They are buried in a small chapel called the Church of the Pater Noster on the Mount of Olives. So it's very sacred ground. Not 100 percent sure how they nabbed that spot.

AMT: Very few people are buried there. Am I right?

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Well actually the only people buried in that chapel is the founder and my parents.

AMT: If you weren't already feeling like a detective that would have done it. Like how did they get in there?

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Exactly. So definitely dialled in. Definitely well-connected. A secret servant. But also a devoted servant to the Vatican no doubt about that.

AMT: How do you think your story and your dad's story would be different if you were coming out now instead of several decades ago?

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Oh, I think it would be very different. Sometimes I wonder if my father wasn't born when he was and sort of a gay man. And I say gay man because when I was out with him that's what I saw. Even though clearly you know he had a lot of sex with my mother. I think his true nature from what I saw he may have made a different choice. And even for me in the eighties I mean being bisexual or fluid or gay or queer or any of that today of course there is a lot more space and a lot more acceptance. We're not all of the way there, but certainly there's a lot more room than there used to be.

AMT: What do you want us to learn from your story?

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: I think the big thing for me is that you don't have to end up where you start and that transparency is really the way to go. I think my book is quite universal because I think everyone understands what it is to keep a family secret no matter how big or small. And I think we lose the chance for intimacy, real intimacy when we're keeping secrets. I know I did. It's a big price to pay.

AMT: You have a good relationship with both parents by the time they died, did you not?

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: I did. Makes me want to cry. I love my parents very much. You know forgiveness is a big part of this book too. Forgiveness of myself, for all the craziness I did and experienced, and also for anyone that harmed me. But my parents I ended up in a really good place. I was at real peace with both of them. I felt like I had thankfully had enough time to work through all the stuff I needed to before they passed and I was able to really love them and see them as human beings by the time they passed and that's such a gift

AMT: Despite their differences and your differences with them — I think that's another lesson isn't it? That those people for whatever reason circumstance or timing can't make their peace with the people who raised them later on always seem to regret it no matter how difficult those people were as parents.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: Absolutely and there are people with difficult parents. But what I've come to learn and I think a great lesson that should be taught somewhere maybe even in school, you know how we look at our parents like human beings. You know at what point do we take off all the labels and the baggage that goes along with the parenting which is justified right? That's their job. But at some point we become adults. We've got to now take responsibility for our life and realize that they are just human beings. And yeah they did the best they could and sometimes that's really not good enough. And yet if we don't forgive and if we don't really hold them as equals to us because we forgive ourselves pretty much you know for what we do we've got to forgive our parents too because we're the same. We're all the same.

AMT: Tina Alexis Allen, it’s good to speak to you. Thank you.

TINA ALEXIS ALLEN: So wonderful to talk with you.

AMT: Tina Alexis Allen is an actor, screenwriter and the author of Hiding Out: A Memoir of Drugs, Deception and Double Lives. She was speaking with me from New York City. Let us know what you think of her story and about what she had to say. You can find us on Twitter we are @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook or go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Coming up in our next half hour, rising from the ice. A U.S. military base brings its toxic legacy to the surface in Greenland. We’ll hear all about the complications of Camp century and all of the complications climate change is creating for other U.S. military bases. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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Melting ice reveals secret nuclear U.S. military base posing environmental risk

Guests: Jeff Colgan, Mike MacFerrin, Inuuteq Holm Olsen

AMT: I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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VOICE 1: This is Walter Cronkite on the Greenland ice cap. Beyond the horizon lies the North Pole. Soon under this ice and snow, some 100 men will be able to live in warmth and comparative comfort; while above them the temp drops to 70 below zero and the wind howls at 160 miles an hour. Their nuclear-powered frontier home will be called Camp Century, their city under the ice.

AMT: That was CBS news legend Walter Cronkite reporting from one of the chilliest points on the many frontiers of the Cold War. At the time the frozen U.S. military installation was portrayed as a less than threatening research base. Here's how a U.S. army documentary described the plans for the camp.

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VOICE 1: A system of 23 trenches would be dug into the ice cap, and covered with steel arches and snow. Branching off the main communication trench would be a series of lateral trenches, housing complete research, laboratory and test facilities, modern living quarters and recreation areas, and a complex of support facilities.

AMT: But American war planners designed Camp Century to play a potentially devastating role in any thermonuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. It's secret purpose was to house 600 ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads. While the missiles were never actually hidden in the ice, the base stayed operational until 1967. In the years since being abandoned snow has buried it even deeper. But now scientists warn that climate change could melt all that snow and ice, eventually exposing Camp Century. And that could create all sorts of political headaches over who's responsible for dealing with the toxic waste that would surface from the melting depths. Jeff Colgan is an associate professor of political science at Brown University. He's the author of a report looking at the political implications of the impact of climate change on military bases. He joins me from Providence, Rhode Island. And I'm also joined by Mike MacFerrin. He's a research glaciologist at the University of Colorado, who's studied the melting ice around Camp Century. He's in Boulder. Hello to both of you.

JEFF COLGAN: Thanks for having us on Anna Maria.

MIKE MACFERRIN: A pleasure to be here.

AMT: Jeff Colgan, let's start with you. So if Camp Century was part of a larger U.S. military plan with these 600 ballistic missiles. What was the actual plan?

JEFF COLGAN: Well so the concern was that the Soviets could attack U.S. bases in Europe and leave the U.S. without the ability to retaliate with nuclear weapons. And so not only did they want to have up to 600 nuclear missiles in Greenland they wanted to put the missiles on a railway of a 4,000 kilometre rail track and have the missiles continuously moving in ice tunnels cut into the ice sheet of Greenland and that way they would be very detect by the Soviet Union and very difficult to take out or to attack in any way. But the whole thing started to sound like a James Bond villain kind of plot to get a base that was technically very, very difficult to build.

AMT: Did they actually build missile launchers? Like the actual launching pads to do that?

JEFF COLGAN: No they never got nuclear missiles to the base and they cut quite a length of tunnels but they never had enough to really have a functioning railway.

AMT: It's interesting. I Googled it today. When you look at it in Google Maps you get the dot and it's just all white. And you have to keep going back, back, back on the map to see where it is in Greenland.

JEFF COLGAN: Yes, very isolated territory. It's over 150 kilometres even to through all Thule air base which is the closest population centre.

AMT: So Mike MacFerrin can you tell us a little bit more about how they actually constructed Camp Century under the ice?

MIKE MACFERRIN: Yeah they actually dug trenches at first about eight to 10 meters deep and with enormous snow machines — snow blowers essentially — and then covered them with arched roofs and buried them. So you had a couple of entrances to the tunnels and then in large vehicles just drive down in there and start installing all of the building and infrastructure.

AMT: So it was a massive project. What did they bring everything up on? What did they do?

MIKE MACFERRIN: Oh, they traversed it in from Thule Air force Base which is about 160 kilometers away on the coast of Greenland to the Thule Air Force Base is still active there. And they would do these large traverses with these very big machines and would essentially cart everything in there. It was a very expensive operation and they assumed it would remain buried forever, is that right Mike?

MIKE MACFERRIN: Well that's the big crux of it now. Yes at the time they assumed it would be "preserved for eternity." Anything that was left behind would be buried in the ice. And this is what we call the accumulation of a glacier. So it snows there year after year and eventually the snow gets compressed down into a glacial ice and the base would get buried with it and it would stay in the ice slowly ever so slowly move out the coast and it wouldn't be exposed for tens of thousands of years. And nobody was really worried about it on those time scales at the time.

AMT: Well I'm going to play you another clip from that U.S. Army documentary about the Camp. This is how it described what was going on there.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Today Camp Century is being operated as a year-round arctic research centre. The men who built the camp have long since been replaced by military and civilian scientists from the polar research and development program. As part of man's efforts to probe deeper and deeper into the secrets of the universe, an elaborate program of tests and experiments is being carried out.

AMT: That music really get [unintelligible].

JEFF COLGAN: It's terrific.

AMT: So how secret then was the true purpose of Camp Century?

JEFF COLGAN: It was very secret even from the U.S. ally Denmark. So of course Denmark is and was the ruler of Greenland and there is a treaty between them in 1951 that allowed America to have a base and operations in Greenland. But Camp Century was outside of that area and there certainly wasn't permission for the U.S. to have nuclear missiles at Camp Century. And so there was a lot of sort of back and forth between America and Denmark about that because the Danish prime minister indicated that he didn't really want to know what was going on up there.

AMT: So plausible deniability or something like that.

JEFF COLGAN: Exactly right. If it had ever come out to the Danish parliament or the public that the Americans had nuclear weapons up there it would have been a major political issue because Denmark had a nuclear free policy in the 1950s. They wanted nothing to do with nuclear weapons and so that would have been a problem for the prime minister and he preferred not to know what was going on.

AMT: Well of course that same map that I Googled the site of Camp Century on shows that there are communities on the coast. Did people living in Greenland know?

JEFF COLGAN: No, none of this was known to the public until the 1990s when a report came out in Denmark. And even then the story was well 'OK there is some waste up there are there some things that happened that maybe Denmark would have preferred not to happen but it's all buried in snow and we don't need to worry about it'. And it's really only recently with all the work done by glaciologists like Mike where we can see that actually this base and the remains of this base are going to come back to the surface at some point in the future.

AMT: Well Mike MacFarrin tell us a little bit more about that. How is climate change affecting the ice and the temperatures in Greenland in relation to this?

MIKE MACFERRIN: Yeah. Well obviously Greenland is warming right now — in a warming climate. And especially in North Greenland and the rest of the Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the world. And Camp Century gets a little bit of not melt in a given year. So it'll snow in then it'll melt a tiny little bit and then it will snow some more and everything gets buried over time. But as things warm up you get more and more melt. And really the crux of it is once you start getting enough melt, where you're melting away all the snow every year and even more then rather than adding little layers of an onion burying it deeper you're then peeling them away. And it's just a matter of time until this stuff reaches the surface and starts running off towards the coast.

AMT: What kind of time do your projections say?

MIKE MACFERRIN: Well our projections say our current path that by the end of the century, by about 2090 or so, we will have reached that turning point to where it would be melting away more than it's accumulating.

AMT: And what kinds of toxic wastes are part of that camp?

MIKE MACFERRIN: Well they literally left everything behind. Everything except the nuclear reactor. They took that with them but they left behind all that waste water. They left behind a very large fuel cache. They left behind all the buildings. And they left behind the waste water from the nuclear plant it was piped a kilometre away into a swamp and that's all still there.

AMT: That's the heavy water, right, you would use in a nuclear plant?

MIKE MACFERRIN: Yes, to my knowledge.

AMT: So they had like a portable nuclear reactor for power to actually power this place.

MIKE MACFERRIN: Yes.

AMT: OK. And what's the potential environmental impact if all that stuff is still in there?

MIKE MACFERRIN: Well one of the largest environmental impacts is from building materials at the time were very heavy with PCBs. Those are toxic. It's a persistent organic pollutant. And when you start running all this off to the coast, including fuel and PCBs and in low level nuclear waste it will reach the coast. It will empty into the bays and estuaries in the rivers around the northeast or northwest coast of Greenland and that's really a big problem for the communities that still live there.

AMT: And that's Baffin Bay. The other side of that bay is Baffin Island. Above Baffin Island you've got the community of Grise Fiord. Could those communities on the other side like the Canadian community be affected by that?

MIKE MACFERRIN: Well to some degree. I mean everything that reaches the ocean will eventually circulate and Canada's very close by.

AMT: Is there already leakage from some of that stuff? Is it already seeping through the glacier and running out?

MIKE MACFERRIN: Not to our knowledge. No. It's buried about 30 to 35 metres deep at the moment. And the glacial ice there is on the order of kilometres deep. So it would actually still take a while if climate wasn't warming until this would actually get to a place where it would start reaching the coast. It is pretty much locked in ice at the moment.

AMT: So Jeff Colgan who is responsible for cleaning that up?

JEFF COLGAN: Well so that's the great question and Mike is absolutely right about Camp Century but there are other bases that were part of this network of bases. Project ice worm had five bases at four locations and one of those bases is already melting out to tunnels which is much closer to the coast. Fortunately there is less pollution there but once that pollution gets into water it starts to bio accumulate. It starts to get into the food chain and up into you potentially those civilian communities that you mentioned, including the one in Canada in Grise Fiord. And so naturally both the Greenlanders and potentially the Canadians are going to want to know who's responsible for the cost of environmental remediation in particular Denmark and the United States are the logical targets for that.

AMT: And what are they saying?

JEFF COLGAN: Right now they're saying nothing. And understandably they're saying we want to know more about the science. We want to understand what exactly is down there and when it's going to come out and how far it's buried at this point. So that's understandable. There is time and as Mike said it's probably decades away although it could be much sooner than the end of the century. There's just so much uncertainty on the trajectory of our climate change future. But even then with the awareness that this is a couple decades down the road at least Greenlanders are saying, 'that's all very good but we want to know now who's going to take responsibility for ultimately cleaning this up?'

AMT: And Jeff you mention there are other bases on Greenland but there are other U.S. military bases elsewhere in the world that are also being affected by climate change, are there not?

JEFF COLGAN: Absolutely. So the U.S. has 600 overseas military bases around the world. And in addition to that many military sites where the U.S. used to have operated and the ones in the Pacific Island are the ones that make me worry the most because like Greenland the low lying islands in the Pacific Island are sort of on the leading edge of climate change. They're the ones that are most affected by the first effects of climate change.

AMT: So you've looked at all of this. Is the Pentagon looking at this as well? Do they have a plan?

JEFF COLGAN: The Pentagon is thinking hard about climate change in particular ways. They're worried of course about sea level rising and potentially changing their quays, their infrastructure, but they aren't necessarily thinking about this problem, about this issue of military bases and military sites that are affected by climate change in ways that we really have an anticipated and that's going to complicate the negotiations between the U.S. military and the host government that ultimately allow the U.S. to operate on their territory.

AMT: So Mike MacFerrin if you look at this problem in Greenland. What's the significance of that when we look at the wider impact of climate change in the Arctic?

MIKE MACFERRIN: Well it's pretty clear that what comes out of the Arctic all this runoff that would cause Camp Century wastes to enter the ecosystem is also the same runoff that's raising seas around the world. So I mean what happens in Greenland certainly does not stay in Greenland. And the trends we're already seeing them. We're already seeing more melting and more runoff and these are starting. We have great uncertainties as Jeff pointed out about the future trajectories. But we do know which direction they're headed.

AMT: It's fascinating because in world time it's really not that long ago that they thought this just would always never be a problem.

MIKE MACFERRIN: Oh absolutely. It's a geological blink of an eye really.

AMT: Lots to think about as we think about planning and we look at what else we collectively as societies have done.

MIKE MACFERRIN: Absolutely. Jeff is right. These are effects of climate change that nobody had really anticipated. Nobody even really thought about it. There will be many, many more of those. Both related to military bases as Jeff studying but also just societally as a whole, as a civilization.

AMT: Gentlemen, thank you for speaking with me today.

MIKE MACFERRIN: It's been a pleasure.

JEFF COLGAN: My pleasure. Thanks.

AMT: Jeff Colgan is the Richard Holbrooke Associate Professor of Political Science & International Relations at Brown University. He was in Providence, Rhode Island. And Mike MacFerrin is a research glaciologist at the University of Colorado. He joined us from Boulder. Camp Century's emergence from the ice could become a toxic issue between the people of Greenland and the countries who made the base possible. Joining us now to talk about Greenland's perspective on this is Inuuteq Holm Olsen. He is the diplomatic representative for Greenland in the U.S. and Canada. He's in our Washington, D.C. studio. Hello.

INUUTEQ HOLM OLSEN: Hello.

AMT: First of all, give us just a little bit of the politics here. Greenland has self-government, some self-determination away from Denmark. Am I right?

INUUTEQ HOLM OLSEN: That's right. This is something that was started in 1979 with the Home Rule act and then it was expanded with the Self-Government Act in 2009. It's basically a law that regulates the relationship between Greenland and Denmark. And because we want to take over as much as possible and eventually take up the question of whether to become independent or not.

AMT: And who looks after international affairs for Greenland then under this system?

INUUTEQ HOLM OLSEN: Well I mean ultimately it is still Danish responsibility. But we have some powers with the government of Greenland in terms of areas that have taken over responsibility from Denmark. So you know that's why I'm representing Greenland in the U.S. as well as Canada. But in that respect you know we work together with Denmark as well.

AMT: So what is Greenland’s position and what should be done about this Camp Century problem?

INUUTEQ HOLM OLSEN: We want full clarity of what lies beneath the ice in terms of the environmental pollution that's sitting there. We want a full investigation of what is contained down there. You know how much and especially the protection and monitoring of the site.

AMT: So in other words you don’t know specifically all the details of what's in that ice right now.

INUUTEQ HOLM OLSEN: No, I mean there was an understanding between Greenland and Denmark to send a team of researchers this past summer to the site to do some drilling and do some tests and also to monitor the site. But that's going to continue over the next summer and possibly after that we will see what the researchers come up with in terms of their recommendations.

AMT: And who do you think is responsible for that clean up?

INUUTEQ HOLM OLSEN: Well I mean you know our principle is that the one who's responsible for this should remedy this. This was during a time where we essentially were a colony. So you know it was behind our backs. And it will either be Denmark or the U.S. that has to take responsibility of this.

AMT: Do you have any indication from the U.S. that they're willing to pay for any potential clean up?

INUUTEQ HOLM OLSEN: I mean they haven't said anything. You know as was stated earlier as well. So we haven't heard anything from the U.S. But it's something that I think will be taken up at some point.

AMT: Are they cleaning up any of that waste from other U.S. military bases there?

INUUTEQ HOLM OLSEN: I mean not the Americans. But we succeeded in making a political agreement between Greenland and Denmark just in January. That was signed between our premier as well as the Danish minister for environment on the cleanup. The other military installations that were constructed during World War II. There's like 30-plus sites in and around Greenland, especially the Americans constructed during that time. You know after years of pondering this issue Denmark decided to make funds available over the next six years to do a cleanup of those sites. But I mean Camp Century is not part of that deal because this is mainly about the military installations that were constructed during or just after World War II.

AMT: There was a big accident near the U.S. Air Force Base in 1968 that actually resulted in nuclear contamination. What happened?

INUUTEQ HOLM OLSEN: Well it's actually 21st of January this year was the 50th anniversary of this tragic accident. As you said it was a B-52 bomber with four nuclear bombs that crashed just outside Thule Air Base.

AMT: What happened to the payload? What happened with the bombs?

INUUTEQ HOLM OLSEN: Well the bomb exploded apparently but there was some speculation about the fourth bomb whether that's still on the bottom of the sea or not. But I think the estimate is that also exploded. But there was a big clean up after the crash. But still what we want to know is that how much plutonium that was cleaned up but especially how much plutonium that was left or estimates about those?

AMT: Because these B-52 bombers carried nuclear warheads during the Cold War; they'd fly around.

INUUTEQ HOLM OLSEN: Yeah. I mean this was during the height of the Cold War. As was also stated earlier I mean this was something that we didn't know anything about. It's kind of ironic as well because Denmark had this policy about being nuclear free zone and this was going on.

AMT: Sort of like don't ask don't tell. What kind of impact does that history have on people’s feelings about this issue now in Greenland?

INUUTEQ HOLM OLSEN: Well I mean we have tried to take on the different issues on a case by case basis. But still I think the feeling that we were left with is that there's so much that was going on behind our backs and that this is ultimately one of the points of why we want to retain responsibility of all the things that happened in and around Greenland in terms of our political development as well as economic development to take because we feel responsible for what goes on.

AMT: Right. And you're on the frontline when it comes to feeling the impact of climate change.

INUUTEQ HOLM OLSEN: Yeah that's right.

AMT: How is it already affecting the day to day lives of people?

INUUTEQ HOLM OLSEN: I mean with any change I think you know come's both positive as well as negative impacts. So we have to reap the positive impact in terms of you know sea ice that means that we'll be able to navigate by ships much more as well as new species of fish that are coming into our waters that we are benefiting from. But in terms of the negative impacts is especially people in isolated areas. For example people near Thule that live off hunting and fishing. I mean they are feeling the negative effects because it's much harder for them when they can't rely on sea ice in terms of hunting animals. So they are having to adapt.

AMT: Thank you for bringing us up to speed on this. It's fascinating. It sounds like it's going to be a fight for a while.

INUUTEQ HOLM OLSEN: Well thank you for having me.

AMT: Inuuteq Holm Olsen is the diplomatic representative for Greenland in the U.S. and Canada. He's in our Washington, D.C. studio. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Tom Power will talk with Newfoundland actor Allan Hawco. He plays a convict who breaks out of prison to finish one last heist with the police hot on his trail, in his new show Caught — it premieres tonight on CBC. And remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It lets you browse through past episodes of our show and start listening in just a few seconds or listen LIVE to your local CBC station, right from your smartphone or tablet. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Canada has seen some pretty devastating and deadly flooding. And one of the deadliest happened in October 1954. Hurricane Hazel roared into the Greater Toronto Area and by the time the great storm had passed, 81 people were dead, and 4.000 had lost their homes. From the CBC archives, here is one survivor's tale. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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February 26, 2018 Episode Transcript

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