Alaska's environmental cleanup work continues: a look at some cleanup projects slated for this summer.

• Author: Campbell, Melissa

Umiat was established in 1944 by the U.S. Navy as a base for exploring oil in National Petroleum Reserve No.4. The Navy built a 5,000-foot gravel runway, a power plant, a shop, several support buildings and fuel storage facilities, all to support 11 exploratory oil wells. In 1953, the Air Force took over the site to use as a communications base. Some 15 years later, the land was transferred to the state of Alaska.

The military simply packed up and headed out, leaving behind contaminated soils, drums full of various products and improperly abandoned drilling wells.

The story is the same in hundreds of sites across the state, and work will continue this summer to clean up some of Alaska's worst cases.

The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, the regulatory agency in charge of keeping track of such things, listed 2,313 contaminated sites in Alaska as of early January. These include military sites, as well as other federal, state and private lands.

All the contaminated sites are prioritized based on a scoring system. Investigators look at the types of contaminants, the toxicity levels, how much is there and the location to populations, giving each of these items a score.

For example, contaminates that are found in groundwater or in the wildlife used for subsistence will likely get higher scores. Those with the highest scores get top priority for cleanup efforts and funding. The agency has more than 200 compounds listed as hazardous substances that it regulates.

According to the DEC, 992 sites are on the high priority list, while 680 have a medium ranking and 468 are low priority. Some 173 sites had yet to be ranked in early January.

The federal government is in charge of cleaning up about a quarter of the sites. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Alaska District heads this work. Last November, officials from DEC met with members of the Alaska District's U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency to develop a Statewide Management Action Plan to prioritize formerly used defense sites, which the military refers to as FUDS.

By the end of this year, the Corps hopes to include input from various tribal organizations in ranking the regions, said Suzanne Beauchamp, the Corps' FUDS program manager.

Petroleum is the main contaminant found in the state, said Jim Frechione, a DEC environmental conservation manager. Other scurrilous products are polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that came from the use of electric transformers...