Engineers bring tanks together: an innovative engineering design by LCMF helps rural communities store all their fuel in one location.

• Author: Campbell, Melissa
• Position: Alaska Native Business News

The village of Kongiganak now has all its tanks in one basket. The engineering firm LCMF Inc. designed a unique new storage facility to replace the village's old, leaking tank farms.

The village, located about 70 miles southwest of Bethel, has three main organizations that store fuel: the village corporation, the village council and the Lower Kuskokwim School District. These organizations mainly store fuel for heating and a smaller amount of gasoline.

A while ago, each organization had its own storage facility. Combined, they consisted of a dozen or so various-sized, rusty, leaking tanks that were built during the 1960s and 1970s, said LCMF's Wiley Wilhelm. Several of the tanks sat in a floodplain and some of the piping was originally designed for sprinkler systems, not fuel.

"The tank farm was in such poor shape," said Chris Mello, of the Alaska Energy Authority, a state-run organization that helped fund the new facilities. "And the community can hardly afford to buy 10 gallons of fuel to allow 1 gallon to spill on the ground."

The Denali Commission and the Energy Authority funded the bulk of the nearly $4 million construction project in Kongiganak. LCMF was tasked to dream up a design. LCMF began operations in 1982 and provides architectural, civil and structural engineering, and surveying services in mostly rural Alaska areas. It is a subsidiary of Barrow Technical Services Inc., which is a part of Ukpeagvik Inupiat Corp., and has offices in Barrow and Anchorage.

When they sat at the planning table for the new tank farm in Kongiganak. designers bad to take into consideration the arctic-yet marshy-conditions, the remote location and the river that runs nearby.

The Kongiganak River runs in a horseshoe around the town. In the past, barges had to bring fuel up the river through the relatively sharp turns to get to the fuel pumps.

LCMF designed a new piping system that runs from the tanks to a point on the river so barges no longer have to navigate the turns. The aboveground, mile-long pipe snakes around lagoons and ponds that lie between the river and the tank facility. Other pipes string around the outskirts of town to smaller, secondary tanks that are used directly for heating or retail sale.

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