Alaska water and sewer challenge: three finalists selected for Phase 3.

• Author: White, Rindi
• Position: ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES

Eighteen teams responded in 2013 to Phase 1 of the Alaska Water and Sewer Challenge, a five-year, five-phased competition coordinated by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (ADEC) with an end goal of allowing Alaskans to eradicate honey buckets.

According to ADEC, more than 3,300 homes in the state lack running water and a flush toilet. Thousands more are either part of a hauled water system or living in a community in which residents are served by piped systems that are on the brink of failure.

Six teams were selected for Phase 2 of the Challenge aimed at finding affordable solutions for rural Alaska homes and villages where public water and sewer systems aren't available or don't make sense.

The three finalists, led by DOWL, Summit Consulting, and the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) were selected by a board to advance to Phase 3 of the competition: prototype development and pilot testing in a laboratory setting.

DOWL

DOWL's team is led by Janelle Rogers, vice president with CDM Smith, Inc. in Seattle, Washington, and includes several other subject-matter experts, including Chris Schultz, a CDM Smith engineer who has developed water systems around the world; the Manoff Group, which provides behavior-centered approaches to enhancing health and nutrition; and a Colorado State University professor who helped design a water reuse system for use on the space shuttle.

Rogers worked in Alaska about thirty years ago, putting sewer and water systems into rural villages, and has worked internationally and nationally since. She says one of the most interesting aspects of this project has been a requirement that each team visits two rural Alaska communities to discuss their proposal.

"That's where we got some of our best ideas, from the people up there," Rogers says.

Some of those ideas include a reduced emphasis on providing water for showers in communities that prefer to bathe using saunas and countertop drinking water filter systems for residents who prefer using melted river or lake ice and rainwater to community-treated water.

The team produced a model with several variations designed to be applicable in any rural home in Alaska. One variation would drain gray water, or water that has been used to wash clothing or for showering, away from the house using an underground soakaway pit so that "it doesn't have a chance to go to a black water tank," Rogers says. "They don't have to pump as often and they don't have to pay for heat to keep it from freezing because it's indoors."

Separating gray water from black water means a significant reduction in the number of times residents have to pump water or pay to have it hauled away, she says. Another variation would be to reuse the gray water after running it through an activated charcoal filter and disinfecting it using an ultraviolet light. The system could be changed to discharge treated gray water overland in wetland communities where soakaway pits will not work. All of the variations include a washable countertop filter for treating and storing melted ice and rainwater.

"All [of the team's options] require a little vestibule on the house. Then it's really a matter of what's in the vestibule. If you have a reuse system, you have a few more things. Otherwise it's just a household tank to hold water from a washeteria and another tank for black water," Rogers says.

The team plans to build its prototype at the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks.

Summit Consulting

Summit Consulting, a construction management company based in Tok, has been installing water and sewer systems for about twenty years, says Dave Cramer, president of Summit Consulting and head of Summit's Water and Sewer Challenge team. "In Alaska, and in the Bush in particular, there will be places where this kind of thing can be done with some help from the state [or other funding agencies]," he says.

"The context for what ADEC is trying to achieve with this approach for bringing sewer service into communities that are hard to serve, or almost impossible with standard sewer systems, is very real to us because we have designed and built systems in communities where it's very difficult to do so," he says. "We have built haul systems in communities where it's impossible [to build piped-sewer systems]." Cramer says individual systems would allow the homeowner to have a higher level of sanitation than honey buckets and would also give homeowners the power to install and maintain the system themselves.

Summit worked with a range of subject-matter...