Water and wastewater woes: thousands of rural Alaskans still hauling potable water and using honey buckets.

• Author: White, Rindi

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Alaska ranked dead last in the nation in the year 2000 for the number of homes without access to running water and sewer. Despite a concerted effort to make running water available for every resident of Alaska, that figure is mostly unchanged thirteen years later, and about six thousand homes are still without in-home water service, according to the state.

That's about one family for every three living in Rural Alaska.

Got cell phone access? Check. Internet? Check. Multiple television channels? Check. Electricity? Check. Flush toilet? Nope.

For some, that means hauling water in five-gallon buckets for cleaning, cooking, and drinking. And without water service, most of those six thousand homes also lack flush toilets, relying on in-home waste containers commonly called honey buckets.

The state and federal government, along with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, have been working to solve this issue, but workers with the state's Village Safe Water program say funding has slipped in the past ten years, and the program is not able to keep up with the need for new water service or repairs to existing water service in the 280 villages scattered across Rural Alaska.

"We have less and less money to do more and more capital projects. The gap continues to grow," says Village Safe Water Facility Programs Manager Bill Griffith. "It's the only rural utility of any kind that doesn't have a subsidy."

Yet it's one of the most important utilities available--numerous studies have shown a lack of running water to be linked with higher rates of skin and respiratory infections.

Most Dire in the Y-K Delta

Of those six thousand homes without running water, roughly half are in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region, Griffith says. Villages in the region frequently have wells that produce only brackish water, a mix of sea and fresh water unsuitable for drinking. Soils tend to be unsuitable for sewer lagoons, he says, and creating a lagoon at sea level generally means hauling in gravel, sometimes from far away by barge, to provide the proper drainage needed.

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"The other thing about the Y-K Delta is, you have a lot of small, very isolated communities," Griffith says.

For the Village Safe Water program, that means a large outlay of capital funding for a project that ultimately won't make a large dent in the goal of getting running water and sewer to those remaining six thousand homes.

A Small Pilot Project Aims at Making Life Easier

That's where the Anchorage Gateway Rotary and The Kuskokwim Corporation [TKC] project "Bringing Clean Water to Rural Alaska Elders" program comes in. It won't drill wells or build a community sewer system, but it will get a source of fresh water into the homes of nine elders in Upper Kalskag.

Upper Kalskag is a village of about 210 residents on the Kuskokwim River about one hundred miles northeast of Bethel. It's one often villages that make up TKC, says Maver Carey, TKC...