Photograph of abandoned fuel drums taken on July 7, 2006 by Jimmy Fox, USFWS.

In 1999, staff from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service discovered eighteen abandoned fuel drums on a meadow within the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge approximately twenty-two miles southwest of Birch Creek – the drums were not leaking. Ownership of the drums is not known, and most likely the drums were left at the site before the Refuge was established in 1980. After several years of requests for special Refuge cleanup funds, the Refuge received monies to clean up the site in 2006. Supervisory Wildlife Refuge Specialist Jimmy Fox, members of the Alaska Fire Service, and ANCOR, a contractor from Anchorage, worked together to characterize drum contents, take soil samples, and remove all materials from the site. The assessment revealed that a few of the drums contained diesel, unleaded, or jet fuel, however most were empty. Soil sample test results fortunately showed that no ground contamination had occurred. Finally, the drums and liquids were airlifted by helicopter forty-five miles to Twelve-Mile Summit on the Steese Highway where the materials were then transported eighty miles by truck to Fairbanks for proper recycling and disposal.