Mountain Tops to Ocean Floors: Safe practices belong in every toolbox.

• Date: 01 August 2022
• Author: Anderson, Tasha
• Published date: 01 August 2022
• Author: Anderson, Tasha

Many projects and processes have a naturally high potential for injury or damage, but that doesn't mean an accident is unavoidable. On the contrary, companies around Alaska demonstrate daily that, with the right attitude toward safety, risky jobs can be carried out with a positive outcome for all involved,

GCI

Over its more than forty-year history, GCI has invested more than $4 billion in Alaska, including its massive Terrestrial for Every Rural Region in Alaska (TERRA) network, which serves approximately 45,000 Alaskans in eighty-four rural communities.

Nearly two dozen of the network's most-remote towers require refueling on an annual basis. "There's no real access via roads, so we use helicopters to fly our fuel to the site," explains GCI Senior Manager of Rural Network Operations & Maintenance Earl Merchant.

It's clearly an operation with significant potential risks.

While some of the stations are within 5 to 6 miles of a nearby community, some are more than 55 or 60 miles away. Additionally, while some are situated in flat plains with "not a mountain in sight for 50, 60 miles," according to Merchant, others are "on a mountaintop where the only place the helicopter can land is over on the edge, and if you walk forward you've got a 1,000-foot drop."

Each site stores approximately 8,600 gallons of diesel fuel on the premises to run the stations and keep the network operating. Helicopters haul out fuel bladders with a capacity of 500 gallons that are filled to about 400 gallons. Merchant says, so each site requires several trips, the exact number depending on power use at the site.

GCI has been refueling the TERRA towers for more than a decade, and the actual process has been refined over the years. For example, early refueling required the fuel bladders to be suspended by a 100-foot line underneath the helicopter. In intervening years. GCI partner Bering Air commissioned a Huey helicopter capable of hauling the fuel within the helicopter instead of dangled below. "The number one benefit [of hauling internally], obviously, is the safety," says Merchant. "You have the [internal] tank and then the double wall bladder, so there's no way it's going to fall out or spill, and everything is protected in there." Additionally, the helicopter can now travel at a normal cruising speed, 100 miles per hour or so, instead of about half that, which reduces the amount of time the fuel is in the air.

Merchant says that a group of GCI employees who worked...