Cleanup work began this month at a mothballed pump station near Delta Junction that was part of the old Haines to Fairbanks Pipeline. Crews will remove contaminated materials from the Timber Pump Station and two other sites that were part of an old Army-operated pipeline built in the 1950s to transport fuel to the Interior’s three military bases.
The work at the old pump station near Quartz Lake includes removing soil, equipment and materiel that were used to help transport fuel from Haines to Eielson Air Force Base, Fort Wainwright and Fort Greely while the pipeline was operating from 1954 to 1973.
Army Corps of Engineers project manager Beth Astley said most of 4,000 cubic yards of soil that’ll be excavated from the Timber Pump Station was contaminated with the byproducts of burning waste oil in an old disposal pit.
“That is the worst of the contamination at that location,” Astley said.
The state Department of Environmental Conservation said the greatest concentration of contaminants was found a few feet below the burn pit. DEC said tainted soil was found elsewhere around the 5-acre site, both on the surface and underground, down to 22 feet, where contaminated groundwater was found. Astley said the Corps of Engineers doesn’t know how much fuel leaked around the pump station over those two decades, because no single major release was ever reported.
“Because there was no catastrophic leak, we can’t really come up with a quantity,” Astley said. “You know, several different locations around the pump station appeared to have small amounts of fuel entering the soil.
Astley said the project contractor – Anchorage-based Bristol Environmental Remediation Services – also will remove three above-ground fuel-storage tanks, the largest of which held up to 59,000 gallons. Also, two underground storage tanks and more than 3,000 feet of above- and below-ground pipes used to move fuel around facility and up the line to Eielson and Wainwright.
“So all of those pipelines are being drained and either removed or, where they can’t be removed, they’re being capped and sealed,” Astley said.
Astley said the cleanup contractor began work on the $3.2 million project at the Timber Pump Station on June 29, right after it had finished work at another old Haines-to-Fairbanks Pipeline facility at Scottie Creek, near the Alaska-Canada border. In September, the contractor will begin cleaning up a third site included in the project, an old tank farm near Birch Lake.
“The actual work won’t begin until after Labor Day, due to the fact that the area is close to the Birch Lake State Recreation Site,” Astley said, “and we don’t want to interfere with Labor Day use of the recreation site.”
The cleanup site is located on the south side of the lake, near a military recreation area. Two big fuel tanks that held up to 277,000 gallons have been removed from the site, along with associated piping and fueling equipment. But Astley said more testing will have to be done to determine how much soil was contaminated and will have to be removed.
“Until we actually get in there and start digging the soil out and determine the full nature and extent what’s at Birch Lake, it’s hard to tell if we’ll be able to completely remove all the contaminated soil this fall,” Astley said.
Astley said the Corps of Engineers also is trying to wrap up remediation at three other Haines-to-Fairbanks Pipeline sites, at Tok; Sears Creek near Dot Lake; and the big fuel terminal at Haines. She said once that’s done, the Corps, which has cleaned up 40 sites so far under the program, will be down to the last 10. Several others are still being cleaned up through a separate Army program.
Tim Ellis is a reporter at KUAC in Fairbanks.
