Winter 2013 CRYOFRONT Column

PRESENT AND FUTURE

‘Washeteria’ facility in Alaska

Piped system in Alaska

Tank and haul system in Alaska

CRYOFRONT: News, Views and Muse from the Far North The future of wastewater treatment in Alaska Ken Johnson, Stantec

T

he history of water and sanitation in Alaska started with water systems constructed by the Alaska Railroad. The Railroad constructed the original water system for Anchorage in 1917. Fairbanks water and sewer system also grew from the industrial activity associated with the Alaska railway in the 1920s.

The remainder of the Alaskan communities, numbering close to 250, remained essentially unserviced until the 1950s. In 1950, fewer than 10% of rural Alaska homes had modern 38 | Western Canada Water | Winter 2013

sanitation. In 1954, the US Public Health Service created the Indian health program with a mandate to improve native Alaskan health. At the time, infectious diseases were responsible for 46% of the deaths of Alaska Natives.

Between 1950 and 1970, the improvements to the water and sanitation in the rural communities were modest.

In the 1970s, a concerted effort was made to provide centralized water and sanitation facilities to communities, with the objectives of 100% water treatment to full regulatory compliance, storage of large quantities of water, distribution of treated water to individual homes through pipes or haul vehicle, and collection of household sewage for lagoon

disposal. The achievement of this water and sanitation servicing objective has been slow, given the number of communities and the capital costs. Alaska today has a population of 730,000 people, of which 300,000 live in Anchorage and 30,000 each live in Fairbanks and Juneau. All of the remaining communities have populations of less than 10,000 people.

Approximately 70,000 of the estimated 120,000 Native Alaskans live in 170 rural villages with populations of less than 300 people each.

The current status of water and sanitation in the smaller communities of Alaska (excluding the North Slope) is that approximately 55% of the communities have piped systems Click here to return to Table of Contents

(135 communities); 21% have onsite household systems (50 communities); 18% are unserved (45 communities) and 4% have hauled systems (10 communities).

Washeterias and central watering points are available in the unserved communities, and consist of treated drinking water sources delivered to a single service connection; people must use their own containers to collect drinking water.

Honey buckets are used for sewage collection in conjunction with washetarias. Individual wells and septic systems make use of the favourable in-situ soil conditions, which includes the absence of significant permafrost.

Haul systems in Alaska, which are a scaled down version of a truck haul system used in the Canadian north, utilize 4 wheel all terrain vehicles (summer) and snowmobiles (winter) to pull specially designed trailer mounted water or sewage containers. These systems have high operating costs, which are passed on to the residents without any subsidy. An outcome of this user pay approach is that the homeowners often self-limit water use, and reuse the dirty water multiple times, which leads to the spread of disease.

The relationship between water use and incidence of disease (more water use and less incidence of disease) has been a theory for more than 50 years, but with little or no scientific evidence of the relationship. In Alaska, the absence of in-home access to safe drinking water and sewage disposal is a documented cause of high disease rates, including severe skin infections and respiratory illnesses. Several recent Alaskan studies found that a lack of in-home piped water service is associated with higher incidence of respiratory tract and skin infections among rural Alaska Natives.

Conventional, community-wide piped systems and haul systems in Alaska are increasingly expensive to construct, maintain and replace.

The available capital funding cannot meet the demand for new systems and rehabilitation of aging systems. As well, many communities cannot afford the high operation and maintenance costs associated with piped or haul systems.

These funding issues are being addressed, in principle, by a program to develop and implement decentralized water and sanitation systems.

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The program recognizes that a decentralized approach provides small scale treatment at each home, and the potential for reduced capital and operation and maintenance costs. Alaska has stated the position that innovative technologies hold the most promise for use in delivering affordable water and wastewater services to

rural Alaska. Decentralized water and sanitation, or water reuse has been tried in the Canadian north, and the trial programs ultimately failed for a variety of reasons, however, the Alaska initiative is on a much larger scale, and the resources applied to the program may be the key to its ultimate success – stay tuned.

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