SUSTAINABILITY

FEATURES
Ascension Island - Wideawake Airfield
receives a sustainable upgrade
A section of the upgraded Wideawake Runway © Stewart Guy
The Wideawake Runway in Ascension
Island is jointly operated between
the United States Air Force (USAF)
and MOD with the maintenance split
between the two parties. The areas of
MOD responsibility which include the
taxiway, shoulders and AGL lighting all
required an upgrade this Financial Year.
Due to historical suppor t for the
US Space Shut tle Programme, the
Wideawake Runway is approximately
30 00m long, an initial review of the
projec t identified that 60 00 tonnes
of aggregate and associated material
would be required to under take
this task . Not an issue when based
in the UK but Ascension is half way
on an 80 00 mile supply route to the
Falklands. If all this material was to
be shipped down it would result
in no fur ther supplies reaching the
Falklands for three months; the real
life impac t of this would be, no
bananas, no maintenance work and
no post for three months!
At this point it was decided to
investigate if there was a suffcient
supply of material from the local
environment. It was identified that the
USAF Quarry was the source of much
of the material that was used to build
the RAF Base in Ascension 30 years
previously and could be used for the
Wideawake Runway upgrade. Once
this material was confirmed as suitable,
the next challenge was deciding how
to get VERY large equipment off a
boat, on and off a barge and into situ
with a swell of about a metre and a
crane that had a maximum lift load
of 20 tonnes. Easy, disassemble all the
kit in the UK, ship it down and then
reassemble in Ascension!
Once the material had been sourced
and some initial (large) pot holes in the
track to the quarry had been filled in, the
requirement for works was undertaken.
The end result was an operational
taxiway that meets the requirements
of two Air Forces’ achieving 99.99%
of waste diverted from Landfill and a
Reuse/Recycling figure of 99.85% of the
6,026 tonnes of waste generated! Some
of the ways this was achieved in the
remote location included:
• 15.5 tonnes of metal waste (empt y
barrels) were cleaned, crushed
and sent back to the UK
for rec ycling
• All of the plastic water bot tles
(approx 0.5 tonne) were returned
to the UK for re -use and therefore
not formally classed as waste
• 142 former AGL fit tings were
retained for use as spares at
Mount Pleasant Air Base in the
Falklands since the model is
now unavailable
• 6,000 tonnes of planings were
re -used on the air field (1,000
tonne), repairing the quarr y haul
road (1,000 tonne) and sur facing
in the USAF base (4,000 tonne)
• 200 wooden pallets were given to
AIG (approx 4 tonnes) for the
Novemb er 5th Bonfire
All with no impact on the Falklands
resupply ship and the Austral
Christmas mail!
Nicolas Andrews-Gauvain
Environmental Advisor Overseas
Defence Infrastructure Organisation
64
Sanctuary 44 • 2015