Tuluksak, Alaska water crisis

TULUKSAK, ALASKA, VILLAGE WATER CRISIS

Edited from articles by Associated Press and KYUK Radio News

Location of Tuluksak, Alaska.

Fire that destroyed water treatment plant and laundromat in Tuluksak, Alaska.

In January 2021, a fire destroyed the water treatment plant and laundromat in the small Alaskan community of Tuluksak. The community has a population of 270 people and is located on the south bank of the Kuskokwim River, approximately 150 kilometres east of the Bering Sea and 600 kilometres west of Anchorage. It lies at approximately 61° 06’ N Latitude, 160° 58’ W Longitude.

After the water treatment plant was destroyed by the fire, the community considered its options for supplying drinking water to its residents. Each option had its advantages and disadvantages. Each individual resident made his or her choice of option to deal with the water crisis, depending on their trust of the water source and the means they had available to them to access the source.

One option was to extract water from a hole in the frozen Kuskokwim River, which is about three kilometres from the community. To get water this way required using a snowmachine or a four-wheeler vehicle. It would take the people 45 minutes for a round trip to the river to get water, and they would need to bring an ice pick with them since the hole in the ice could be frozen over. Another option was to get water from the smaller Tuluksak River, which is closer to the community. However, some residents did not trust the quality of the water from the Tuluksak River because of its brown colour.

Another option was donated bottled water that could be picked up from the Tuluksak Native Community office. However, the available supply of bottled water was quickly used up, and the community had to request enough bottled water from the State of Alaska to last them until the spring breakup. Bottled water was also available at the local store, but it was being sold for around $60 USD per case. There were other ways of getting donations of bottled water. Activists, a gold mining company, and even an Indigenous rapper from the pop-rap group the BlackEyed Peas offered to provide free bottled water to the residents.

Soon after the fire, the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation (YKHC) installed a temporary but small water treatment plant in the school. The intake pipes for this plant were placed in the Tuluksak River. This water was brown, but much of the brown sediment could be settled out of the water, which improved its colour. The temporary water plant was housed in the school’s shop area and the treated water was only available to the residents for about six hours each day. It was anticipated that the temporary intake system would be too fragile to withstand the ice floes released during breakup.

When breakup came, the community had to pull the temporary water treatment plant’s intake system out of the river, wait for the river to be clear of ice, and then re-install it on a floating dock. To have an adequate supply of water for the community’s use during this period, the community had to prepare by filling their individual water storage tanks. There was a few thousand gallons of water storage available for each household, which could carry them through a couple weeks until the ice in the river cleared.

The third part of the emergency response was to deliver and install a larger portable water treatment plant for the community. It could be brought in on the ice road from Bethel, 50 kilometres east and downstream from Tuluksak. While the larger plant was portable, it was not easy to move. When it came to time to transport the unit, the contractors were plagued by thinning river ice. In the end, the condition of the ice road was too dangerous for them to bring the water plant on a truck, from Bethel, by driving on the ice road. At one point, the Army National Guard thought it might be able to fly the portable water plant to Tu-

luksak using a Chinook helicopter. However, this option was not seriously considered or used.

Eventually, plans for bringing in the larger water treatment plant were put on hold until river conditions were stable enough to barge up the portable water plant, which a contractor finally did in June 2021. Workers completed installing the plant shortly after that and had it operating later in the summer.

The assessment done at the end of the summer of the emergency response found that the temporary YKHC water supply and treatment system that piped water from the Tuluksak River to the school was not used by many people in the community. The issues which caused the residents to not use this water supply were the perceived quality of the water, the fact that the school sits at the edge of town, and that access to that water was limited both by the school’s hours of operation and by its storage tanks.

The final phase of this complete process is the eventual building of a new permanent water treatment plant for the community. YKHC is working with the Government of Alaska and an engineering consultant to get updated cost estimates and timelines for this project. It is estimated that a new water treatment plant will cost about $8 million (USD), with construction to be completed in the summer of 2023. S

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