The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said its cleanup work plan for former military sites is shrinking by about 40%, but officials say cleanup sites around Unalaska are still moving forward.
The Corps’ Formerly Used Defense Sites program cleans up contamination left behind from past military activity. In Unalaska and the Aleutians, that includes petroleum contamination, munitions and other hazardous materials from World War II-era sites.
Corps officials say the program has lost staff over the last year, including six project managers and nearly half its technical staff.
Project Manager Melinda Brunner said that leaves only a handful of staff handling a heavy workload.
“We have half as many staff as we did a year ago, but we still have 100 active projects across the state now for five or six project managers, so it's a lot,” Brunner said. “We've also lost almost half of our technical staff.”
“That's probably been one of our largest issues,” she added.
Brunner said that means the Corps has to narrow its workload. More than a third of the program’s sites around the state will not be on the agency’s work plan for now.
Unalaska’s projects aren’t on the chopping block, Brunner said. She said the Corps has completed the projects that the community identified as top priorities, mainly in the Unalaska Valley. Now they’re moving on to the second-priority locations that a community working group identified.
But that doesn’t mean residents will see excavators moving dirt this summer. Tighter budgets mean the Corps will be focusing on what it can do with current staff. That means preparing documents needed to eventually move those projects toward contracts and field work.
“So working on the documentation that we need to move them forward and get contracts out,” Brunner said. “There are other sites around the state that we are not going to have on the work plan. We’re not going to be requesting to fund them. We’re not going to be working on them. That’s the plan.”
Unalaska’s most recent cleanups include Summer Bay, Humpy Cove and Little South America, overseen by Project Manager Emily Volo.
“The main concern was heating oil leaked from underground storage tanks at the site, and we already removed most of that,” Volo said. “This was just that little bit that was remaining. We were sampling to see if there were any additional impacts from that.”
Volo said recent testing found no contamination in groundwater at Summer Bay and Humpy Cove, so now the Corps is now moving to close out those sites.
But some residents have questioned whether the Corps’ cleanup standards are strict enough. A University of Alaska study raised broader concerns about contamination at former military sites in Unalaska.
Brunner said Corps officials reviewed the study, and that past cleanup decisions used the applicable state standards at the time.
“Cleanup levels do change over time, based on science, based on law changes, based on finding out about new contaminants,” Brunner said.
She said the Corps uses state cleanup standards, but those standards can change over time. She said Alaska has general cleanup levels for contaminants like diesel, but regulators can also use site-specific calculations based on local soil and groundwater conditions. That means the cleanup level for one site may not match the state’s general table.
People wishing to get involved in the Corps’ cleanup efforts can learn more through the Army Corps’ Formerly Used Defense Sites page.
