Environmental field tests came back clean last month for a site in Dillingham that had long been contaminated with diesel fuel. Cleaning up the site — which is one of 20 active contamination sites around Dillingham — took more than a decade of cooperation between federal and tribal governments
Early on the second day of a recent three-day clean up effort, the Curyung Environmental Program’s three-person team watched a small excavator lifting dirt from a roughly 9-foot-wide hole and then loading it into white polyethylene supersacks.
“We are witnessing history,” said Patty Buholm, the Curyung Tribe’s environmental program coordinator. “The cleanup of the old Kanakanak radio relay site. Hopefully this is the last bit and then we can close this project.”
The contamination was on two patches of land at the old radio site, just a stone’s throw away from each other at a 1950s military site on the outskirts of town. The cleanup, which the Curyung Tribal Council’s environmental program spearheaded, is part of a U.S. Department of Defense program to address contamination left behind on Native land.
Buholm inherited the project when she became the director of the environmental program last September, but it goes back much further. In 2015, the tribe and the Department of Defense tested large areas around the old military site, and two small patches came back positive for diesel contamination. Then, alongside the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, they made a plan for how to handle the contamination.
One option was to leave the diesel there, introduce bacteria and frequently churn the soil to break it down. But the Corps determined that would cost more than excavating the contaminated soil.
Earlier this year, the tribe contracted Bristol Environmental Solutions to do the field work. Jake Sweet, with the Corps, oversaw the excavation. He said the 12 supersacks filled with soil from the site would head to Anchorage before likely ending up at a treatment facility in the lower 48.
“In the scheme of things, this is a fairly small-scale project,” he said. “I think we pulled out what? Six cubic yards from here?”
Sweet added that at his last project, they pulled out 2,000 cubic yards.
At the Dillingham site, Sweet said they found rusted-out fuel cans, which they believe are the most likely source. He said there was likely a small amount of fuel in the soil.
“There is a cleanup level that's set by the state of Alaska, and these two spots were just a little bit above what that cleanup level is,” he said.
Buholm said the project took so long because of how much administrative labor a project like this takes, along with local staff capacity and turnover over the years.
“It's a lot of planning and communication and emailing and reporting,” Buholm said. “So it's very time-consuming to do a project like this. It's just, it's a lot of work.”
After the two patches of land had been excavated, Bristol Environmental Solutions collected soil samples from the base and the sides of the holes and conducted field tests. Anything under 20 parts per million would be considered clean — about 20 drops of water in a 10-gallon tank.
The highest reading of the day was 11.2, well below the threshold where they would have to keep digging. But the samples still needed to be sent out for testing at a lab outside of Chicago to confirm they are clean.
While there is still paperwork to do, Buholm said that hopefully the bulk of the project is finished. But she said the federal funding from the Environmental Protection Agency that the tribe’s environmental program relies on is uncertain. The Trump administration's DOGE program has canceled more than 400 EPA grants in the past several months, roughly $1.8 billion dollars worth of funding. But for now, Buholm said the Curyung environmental program's grants are all intact.
Final lab results for the soil from the radio relay site are expected in the coming month.
