Bear safety for North Slope workers: training is key--for people and bears.

• Author: Strieker, Julie
• Position: OIL & GAS

Workers on the North Slope deal with a number of hazards such as the region's remoteness and its notoriously poor weather. They also have to be on the lookout for wildlife, including grizzly and polar bears.

Bears Like Free Food

In the 1980s it was not uncommon to see bears nosing around oil facilities, drawn by open dumpsters and landfills and unsecured food waste. Some workers even fed the bears. Bears, conditioned to human food sources, lost their fear of people and became a threat, says Justin Blank, senior environmental scientist at Fairweather LLC.

In Deadhorse, a fence was put up around the landfill in the early 1990s and the bears were shut out.

"When they put the gate up, all those bears that were getting a free meal became real problems for the camps around there," Blank says. "Once a bear gets trained, gets food-conditioned, it's hard for them to switch back to their natural diet, back to hunting. They'll become problem bears nine times out of ten."

Officials in Deadhorse killed ten bears that had broken into buildings, according to a bear fact sheet published by ConocoPhillips. More than a dozen other bears were killed in defense of life and property.

But in the early 1990s, the landfills were fenced off and stricter controls over food implemented, including the installation of bear-proof dumpsters at remote sites. Oilfield operators increased education and training efforts for workers and a Slope-wide Wildlife Avoidance and Interaction Plan was implemented.

Working in Bear Habit

Much of the development on the North Slope is in grizzly bear habitat along rivers and wetlands and polar bear habitat near the ocean. It's rare for polar bears to go more than fifty miles inland, Blank says. He estimates there are about 2,000 polar bears in Alaska. And while grizzlies were rarely seen on the North Slope before the oilfields were constructed, there are an estimated 1 to 2 bears per one hundred square miles near the coast, according to an Alaska Department of Fish and Game study, with higher densities near the Brooks Range.

Alyeska Pipeline Service Company spokesman Bill Bailey says there have been no sightings of polar bears at Pump Station 1 for nearly two decades. However, grizzly bears are occasionally seen nearby and all personnel are trained on bear safety.

North Slope security personnel regularly patrol the road and marine systems in and around Prudhoe Bay, and TAPS security regularly patrols the pipeline right-of-way, Bailey...