Decontaminating Kipnuk: preparing the site for a new school.

• Author: Seely, Nichelle
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Environmental Services

When I visited the village of Kipnuk in the spring of 2010 to inspect the recently completed teacher housing, I noticed a pervasive odor near the main entrance of the school. The adjacent sewage lagoon had overflowed and some of the runoff had accumulated, along with snowmelt, in a broad pond at the base of the entry ramp. Two girls in rubber boots splashed through the water, laughing as they kicked through chunks of ice.

The shortcomings of the sewage treatment pond were well-known by the villagers, and I learned that they dealt with it in practical rural style. During the winter, a man with a chainsaw would carve out chunks of frozen effluent and drag them out of the lagoon and onto the river ice, to be carried out to sea during spring breakup. Not a great solution, but surely healthier than allowing liquid sewage to flood the schoolyard.

When the Lower Kuskokwim School District awarded Bezek Durst Seiser Architects and our team of consulting engineers the opportunity to renovate the old school and design a new addition, we discovered the site was also contaminated in other ways. Spillage from the district fuel tank farm and individual residential tanks on the property was going to require remediation of the surrounding soils. Several small structures slated to be demolished contained asbestos and other hazardous materials. In addition, when the geotech team extracted core samples for analysis, a spark from the machinery ignited a spurt of flame from the newly drilled hole. The ground was permeated with methane gas.

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BDS has a lot of experience designing for rural Alaska, and--with the exception of the methane--we knew we would encounter these kinds of environmental issues. Problems like these are common in these roadless areas so isolated from urban infrastructure. Even the presence of methane gas is not unheard of--it bubbles up in tundra lakes and emanates from landfills. Anywhere significant amounts of organics are decaying, it will be found.

We engaged R&M Engineering to perform civil engineering tasks, Oasis Environmental to help us deal with the sewage lagoon as well as assist with the contaminated soil, and EHS-Alaska for their expertise in hazardous building materials. Together with our consultants, BDS developed a plan to address the various problems.

Removing the Sewage Lagoon

First on the list was the lagoon. Not only was its proximity to the school unhealthy, it was right where we...