Cleanup activities in Alaska.

• Author: White, Rindi
• Position: ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES

Alaska's history as a resource state and a military staging ground has left it with a freckling of cleanup sites, many of which contain hazardous material.

But cleanup is no easy task. It's often years after a spill that cleanup begins, or sometimes new rules dictate more intensive cleanup than was previously planned. Before cleanup can begin, surveys must be done, reports made documenting what might have been spilled on the site, and the area must be assessed for the best cleanup approach. Cleanup contractors have been working on some of the sites for decades and have decades longer to go before the task is complete.

Former Military Sites

Alaska's military history, which included participation in World War II and a role as a part of the Cold War and Distant Early Warning Line, means the state is scattered with inactive former military sites.

The state was also home to military bases that are now cleanup sites, such as a fairly large naval base at Attu, and to supply lines, such as the Haines-Fairbanks pipeline that provided liquid petroleum products to Fort Wainwright, Eielson Air Force Base, and Fort Greely. The sites are no longer owned by the military; a stipulation of the Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS) program is that ownership must have transferred by October 1986, often to other federal agencies.

Ken Andraschko, chief of the FUDS program for the US Army Corps of Engineers-Alaska District (USACE), says USACE oversees about one hundred cleanup projects a year around Alaska and receives an average of $30 million to $35 million year for the cleanup efforts.

"We have the most FUDS with hazardous/ toxic or containerized wastes left by far," Andraschko says. "That's one reason we're getting quite a bit of funding."

The federal government has a goal of cleaning up 95 percent of Installation Restoration Program, or IRP, sites around the nation by the year 2021, he says. Other states have more military munitions sites and other sites that don't fall into the IRP category, Andraschko says. Those IRP sites have largely been cleaned up in the Lower 48, but Alaska didn't get as much funding as other states to clean up IRP sites in the early years of the cleanup effort. Now, it's getting as much as 20 percent of the overall national FUDS cleanup budget, he says.

Attu Work Begins

This year, the largest project happening in the state is at Attu, where the agency is starting what will likely be a long, intensive, and costly cleanup effort.

"Attu...