ARRA stimulus funds: Alaska's $1.2 billion share.

• Author: Kalytiak, Tracy
• Position: CONSTRUCTION

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Since 1973, scientists in Alaska have dreamed of researching the ocean and creatures that live in it while aboard a ship hardy enough to withstand the pounding of winter storms and maneuver through icy conditions.

Now, 36 years later, $1.48 billion flowing from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will realize that dream. The grant for construction of the 254-foot Alaska Region Research Vessel is the highest-dollar award among Alaska's approximately 1,000 grants, contracts and loans.

"These are research vessels that belong to a national fleet that universities and university institutes and programs can use to study oceanography," said Terry Whitledge, principal investigator on the project, who is a professor and director of the Institute of Marine Science, University of Alaska Fairbanks. "It seems like a lot, but a research vessel is a very complicated machine."

Delivery of the vessel is anticipated in mid-2013, with science operations beginning in 2014. Whitledge expects 300 to 500 scientists a year will come north to ride the vessel and conduct research in the Arctic Ocean and Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas.

"We only have a small window in mid- to late-spring to early fall when we can go out and take samples," Whitledge said. "Seven to nine months of the year, we're having to basically make pronouncements about what's going on without being there most of the time. That hampers us a lot in knowing how the ecosystem works when we're only there less than half of the seasons."

ARRA stimulus grants, contracts and loans are being used in Alaska to do such things as build or modernize rural housing, improve the quality of drinking water and wastewater treatment, buttress education-related funding and upgrade highways and rural airports.

A Nome hospital project is receiving a large infusion of the federal money, as are the Alaska Department of Education, a Detroit-based company building military housing, the State Department of Transportation and the Alaska Railroad Corp.

President Barack Obama on Feb. 17, 2009, signed ARRA into law. The $787 billion recovery package was designed to jump-start the economy to create and save jobs, according to www.recovery.gov. The Web site provides statistics and an interactive map detailing stimulus money recipients and expected jobs created or saved.

Alaska recipients are receiving 1,006 awards--contracts, grants or loans--worth a total of $1.2 billion, and creating or...