Decontaminating Alaska: cleaning up the 49th State.

• Author: McKee, K.T.
• Position: ENVIRONMENTAL SERVICES

The Cold War may be over, but the battle over cleaning up toxic waste and contaminated soils at hundreds of abandoned military sites in Alaska is hotter than ever for environmental services companies. Whether on the tip of the Aleutian chain at Atka or just north of Anchorage at the Native Village of Eklutna, the United States Department of Defense continues to budget money--$46 million this year alone for Alaska--to dig up and properly dispose of hundreds of rusting drums and other volatile remnants of strategic posts from World War II and the '50s.

"Environmental clean-up is the name of the game right now," Brice Environmental Services Corp. General Manager Craig Jones says when talking about Brice's $5 million contract to clean up a former anti-aircraft artillery site near Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks. "The jobs are sometimes hard to get, but when you win the bid, it can be a windfall for your company."

Coordinated through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Formerly Used Defense Sites program identified more than 500 potentially contaminated sites throughout the state after the program was created in 1986, according to FUDS Program Manager Ken Andraschko and the Corps of Engineers website, which currently shows 299 site in Alaska.

Sixty of those projects have been completed, Andraschko said. The FUDS work is estimated to continue until 2020. Additional contaminated properties fall under the Native American Lands Environmental Mitigation Program, which was created by Congress in 1992 after it was determined many Native lands were not being properly cleaned up under FUDS. NALEMP provides for a cooperative partnership between tribes, the government and the companies tasked with cleaning up the contamination.

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"The NALEMP program provides a unique opportunity to include tribes in the projects that affect their lands," said Elijah Donat, senior project manager of Chilkat Environmental LLC, a company based in Haines that works partly under NALEMP contracts. "The FUDS projects, on the other hand, don't include anybody except the large contractors chosen for the jobs. They have no incentives to build relationships in the community because they'll never be there again after the job is done."

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The Eklutna site is a perfect example of the challenges of identifying and mitigating contaminants left by military activity of the past, Donat said.

"The Eklutna Army site went through a series of five assessments since the '60s...