SeaLife Center construction begins.

• Author: Carroll, Ed
• Position: Alaska SeaLife Center, Seward, AK

Project supporters gather to mark the start of the 20-month, $27.5 million construction of the marine research center on Seward's waterfront.

By the time builders finish the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward, construction workers and tradesmen will have poured 20,000 man-hours of their lives into the place. Along the way, they'll pour 9,600 cubic yards of concrete, lay four miles of pipe, place 937 tons of rebar, erect 427 tons of steel and hang 280,000 square feet of sheet rock for the 120,000-square-foot building and its outdoor spaces.

That's an enormous undertaking, even for public construction projects in Alaska. But despite its size and dominant position on the seaward end of Seward's downtown, it's the building's function that will make it truly unique. When it opens to the public - scheduled for May, 1998 - the center will be the second cold-water marine research facility in the world and the first in the Western Hemisphere.

In ceremonies marking the start of structural work on the project in late June, former Gov. Walter J. Hickel told a boat-load of SeaLife Center supporters and officials that the research, wildlife rehabilitation and education mission of the center will enhance understanding of the environment of the waters of the Gulf of Alaska and Prince William Sound. Hickel helped give the project its first big funding boost in 1993, when he supported legislation to give organizers $12.5 million from the state's $100 million criminal settlement with Exxon for the disastrous 1989 Exxon Valdez spill.

The facility will be owned by the city of Seward, which donated seven acres of waterfront for the site and recently sold $17.5 million in revenue bonds to help finance construction and startup. The largest portion of the project's $50 million construction and startup price tag came as a commitment of $25 million from the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council to support marine ecosystem research. Those funds were part of the nearly $1 billion Exxon paid the state and federal governments as a civil settlement.

The trustee council has spent much of that settlement buying land in the spill-affected area, in an effort to protect and study the ecosystems of the Sound and Gulf Coast.

The non-profit group Seward Association for the Advancement of Marine Science will operate the center. The SAAMS board of directors selected Strand Hunt Construction Inc. as general contractor, a Kirkland, Wash.-based company with an Anchorage office. Strand...