Total restoration: what we learned in year one.

• Author: Carroll, Ed
• Position: Alaska's total environmental restoration contract

Despite a slower-than-expected start, Alaska's total environmental restoration contract is up and running, putting Alaskans to work.

When the U.S. military left the Aleutian Islands after World War II, it left behind much of what the war effort built. At the Akutan Naval Station on Akutan Island, near Dutch Harbor, the Navy left a legacy that included six 200,000-gallon oil tanks when it sailed off to new missions in 1943.

Those tanks became decaying pollution time bombs. The base was used to fuel Russian ships and planes during the lend-lease program early in the war. Preventing pollution was not a priority in fuel-handling practices of the day. Cleaning up the base before leaving was not important amidst global warfare. The tanks sat for more than 40 years with rotting and missing roofs, and the surrounding ground became stained with vintage bunker fuel. As the aging infrastructure crumbled, the threat posed by thousands of gallons of remaining fuel grew.

To make matters worse, the site had been used as a whaling station for nearly 30 years before the war, complicating the history of human impacts. The Navy reportedly stored diesel in the old whale oil tanks, but the preexisting structures made documenting the sources and extent of pollution on the site more difficult. Oil was seeping all around the former base, into nearby wetlands and down to the seashore. Contamination and the threat to natural resources was clear, but because of the many pollution sources and polluted sites, cleanup would be complex. It would take a costly study - estimated at $1.5 million - just to determine how much oil was sitting in the many tanks and to estimate how much contaminated soil to dig up.

Across Akutan Pass, on Unalaska and Amaknak Islands, dozens of underground storage tanks and a 1.7-million gallon tank farm were abandoned in nine main areas of wartime use. Contamination concerns on those sites included leaking tanks and pipes, chlorinated solvents, PCBs, ordnance and explosive waste, asbestos and lead paint.

Because of Akutan's complexity and the similar state of the nearby sites, Akutan Naval Station, Amaknak and Unalaska became the first big job for Alaska's total environmental restoration contract, or TERC. It took nearly a year to get a project funded through Alaska's TERC, which was awarded at the end of July 1995.

TERC project managers for the Army Corps of Engineers and private sector contractors say this summer's work in the Aleutians demonstrates how Alaska's TERC will work in the coming years. They point first to cost efficiencies achieved in the field that will end the threat of pollution sooner and for less money than through other contract methods. They point to an Alaska-hire record that has used Alaskan sub-contractors, minority-owned and disadvantaged businesses and local labor whenever possible. And, say Mike Redmond of the Corps and Rich Greiling of Jacobs Engineering Group, this summer's less-than-expected workload shows that the TERC will not dominate Alaska's environmental services industry as many in the business have feared.

"This year, in fact, I don't think we've received the most work from the Army. Our number is somewhere right around $10 million for work actually done," Greiling says.

Somewhere in the alphabet soup of federal cleanup contracts, worth an estimated $100 million in Alaska in recent years, Greiling believes there may be another large contractor here who quietly garnered more work last year with a handful of more traditional contracts than Jacobs Engineering saw funded through TERC.

The Alaska TERC is a four-year contract with two, three-year extension options worth a maximum of $240 million. It was highly sought by eight environmental engineering and construction management firms over a one-year preparation and selection process. Among the heavyweights that submitted proposals, Pasadena-based Jacobs won the TERC and the others have either stayed to bid on smaller contracts or have turned their resources toward other markets.

The lure of the TERC and anticipation of increased overall federal cleanup...