In late May of this year, a huge oil tank collapsed in Norilsk, an industrial city in north-central Siberia. An estimated 21,000 tons of diesel fuel spilled into the Ambarnaya and Daldykan rivers coating the water with an oily crimson layer. A failed attempt to contain the spill lead to further contamination downstream as the oil spread northward, entering the 45-mile-long Lake Pyasino, a on its way to the Arctic ocean. One of the largest spills documented in the Arctic, the Norilsk spill has been compared to Alaska’s 1989 ExxonValdez oil spill. As with the ExxonValdez, the spill occurred during spring migration, poisoning the waters just as fish and birds are returning to their natal grounds.
Russian mining firms identified melting permafrost as the culprit – destabilizing the soil under the tank. Clearly, as the arctic warms, the potential for lethal spills increases. Better surveillance of melting permafrost with inexpensive temperature probes would likely have prevented the spill. Despite the up-front costs, preventative measures save hundreds of millions of dollars in clean-up efforts and safeguard wetlands and the wildlife and human inhabitants they support.
Voluntary compensation for damages from Norilsk Nickle in the amount of $148 billion rubles, or $2 billion dollars.
A recent study conducted by scientists from the University of Washington, University of Utah, and University of Alaska Anchorage, concludes that a population of seals found in Lake Iliamna, Alaska’s largest lake, form a distinct, freshwater population. An analysis of the seals’ teeth indicates that the approximately 400 animals depend exclusively on freshwater fish found in the lake, rather than saltwater fish species consumed by other, marine-based, harbor seals. This finding brings the number of known freshwater seal populations around the globe to five.
This distinction has led the Center for Biological Diversity to petition the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to protect the Iliamna population under the Endangered Species Act. Threats to the population, according to the petition, include the proposed Pebble Mine, which would create the largest open-pit copper, gold and molybdenum mine in the state, along with associated infrastructure, including a ferry system across Lake Iliamna, and massive freshwater withdrawals. The proposed mine is located in southwestern Alaska’s Bristol Bay watershed, home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon runs.
Every year, the national “Imagine a Day without Water” campaign raises awareness and educates Americans about the value of water in everyday life.
In October 2019, the campaign’s theme emphasized imagining “No water to drink, or even to make coffee with. No water to shower, flush the toilet, or do laundry…Some communities in America already know how impossible it is to try to go a day without our most precious resource: Water.” There are five villages in the Bering Sea region including Stebbins, Teller, Wales, Diomede and Shishmaref, that fit this description perfectly because most homes in these villages have never had running water.
Each of them have various strategies for compensating for the lack of running water. Shishmaref, for example, collects snow over the winter into a catchment and drains the melted water into a lined pond. The water is filtered and then pumped into a 1.3 million gallon tank. The water catchment needs a new liner and a transfer line but the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium — an Anchorage based entity that provides funding for municipal water and sewer, doesn’t have the money to upgrade it. Diomede needs $50,000 to make improvements to its water system and in the meantime, in order to obtain access to fresh water for drinking, the majority of people, use rainwater or ice water.
At a rate of a quarter per gallon, the Wale’s school and teachers’ housing which are supported by Bering Straits School District and the health clinic are the only facilities that can afford treated running water but the rest of the community goes without. For sewage disposal, the village stages bins in various locations throughout the community where people dump their honey buckets. The bins are collected and hauled out to a lagoon where they are dumped.
Due to a lack of infrastructure, Shishmaref, Diomede, and Wales are on the Environmental Protection Agency’s list of drinking water systems that are over the limits for what EPA has deemed to be safe for humans for arsenic, nitrates, uranium, and other contaminants. Even those Alaska villages with adequate water infrastructure still have occasional issues with access to running water. After someone ran into a power pole with a backhoe in Elim (located in the Norton Sound region) last spring, the municipal water pump blew a fuse due to the lack of electricity, and the entire village had no electricity or running water for almost a week while the city waited for a new pump.
So far, Bering Sea communities haven’t been able to get much assistance in establishing water infrastructure from the federal or state government.
While the Trump administration recently adopted a $1.5 trillion plan to rebuild the countries crumbling water infrastructure including in small communities, for example, the plan includes a mere $200 billion in federal funds while the remaining $1.3 trillion would come from sources that those communities would need to come up with. Because many small communities generally don’t have access to those kinds of funds they would need to turn to private investors to develop or rehabilitate water infrastructure giving those investors too much control over what has traditionally been a public resource.
Similarly, in order to cut spending or pave the way for oil and gas development in Alaska, so far, Governor Mike Dunleavy’s focus on Arctic communities is to veto legislation or cut existing programs designed to protect human health and welfare or that would have helped build resiliency to the ravages of climate change.
One of the only politicians who has paid any attention to the appalling lack of water infrastructure for Arctic communities, is Senator Lisa Murkowski who after a visit last summer to Teller, Brevig Mission and Wales stated “we know the costs here are so high it can literally take every dollar for water and wastewater projects.”
However, Senator Murkowski may also be missing an opportunity to incorporate adequate water infrastructure for Arctic village communities in her recently revealed plans to reintroduce the Shipping and Environmental Arctic Leadership Act (SEAL Act). The act is intended to shore up infrastructure that could take advantage of increased shipping and exploitation of resources in the Bering Sea area, but it does not include developing adequate water infrastructure for Arctic communities.
It seems that whenever, federal or state policy makers talk about the Arctic, these days, the emphasis is on taking advantage of a warming temperatures and melting sea ice to exploit rather than protect local communities or the environment.
n so doing, we are continuing to leave many such communities way behind.
Hal Shepherd is a consultant and writer on water policy issues living in Homer, Alaska.
What was I doing in the plush Nugget Casino in the 90 degree heat of Sparks, Nevada last month talking about improving Water Infrastructure through Resilient Adaptation of Alaska Native Village Communities in the North Bering Sea region? Because while the room full of water Geeks attending the summer specialty conference of the American Water Resources Association, were familiar with all the news coverage about super hurricanes and flooding on the east coast, they probably were not that familiar with the plight of communities in the North Bering Sea region (NBSR) of Alaska who are dealing with similar threats to their water infrastructure.
Arctic communities are have been experiencing increased permafrost melt, loss of sea ice, extreme weather events, flooding and erosion that may make current residences and settlements uninhabitable in the near future. Such communities have another thing in common with coastal cities on the east coast-they are in direct competition for limited federal disaster and hazard mitigation funding to defend against the inevitable march or climate change. In many cases, for example, agencies require cost-benefit analysis, plans, environmental analysis, or other measures above and beyond analysis or strategies contained in Hazard Mitigation Plans (HMPs) or other plans before such communities qualify to apply for funds. Similarly, because standard arctic community HMPs do not contain a detailed cost-benefit analysis of natural hazards affecting water resources, such communities cannot obtain high rankings that larger cities can to qualify for competitive funding or other federal or state assistance needed to address such impacts. Finally, the villages cannot afford to hire consultants or even staff to conduct climate adaption planning on behalf of such communities to include more meaningful consideration of economic impacts and risks associated with coastal water resource management resiliency strategies, in order to move beyond the planning phase and into on the ground project implementation.
During my talk at the conference, therefore, I emphasized the need to conduct economic risk-benefit and environmental analysis and otherwise close the gap between Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other governmental funding and technical assistance programs such so that North Bering Sea communities can implement on-the-ground projects that will address the Villages’ climate-related coastal water resources management challenges. Hopefully, word will travel to the ears of these agencies so that tribes in the Arctic can move behind the planning phase and into project implementation…something the needs to happen…yesterday.
Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt and Secretary of Commerce Wilbur RossIn U.S. District Court in Anchorage recently, filed notice that they are appealing the March 29 ruling that threw out Trump’s executive action reopening closed Arctic and Atlantic waters to oil leasing.
In that ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason said Trump violated the law with a 2017 executive order that reversed President Obama’s actions withdrawing most U.S. Arctic waters and portions of the Atlantic Ocean from the federal offshore oil and gas leasing program. Presidents have the right under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to withdraw areas from leasing, but adding areas to the leasing program requires Congressional action, Gleason said in her ruling.
Memos drafted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service identifying outdated vegetation maps and studies of the impact of oil development on caribou, insufficient air quality modeling, and studies of the impacts of the development on Polar bears, could expose the Trump administration to litigation. The memos were hidden from public view until environmentalist published them the day before the comment period ended on the Trump administration’s draft study of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
The significance of the USFWS comments are the legal leverage they will provide to environmental groups who have vehemently opposed drilling in ANWR and will not be able to resist the administration’s criticism of it’s own plan to challenge the leasing plan in federal court.
According to Dermat Cole, an Artic Today columnist “It’s ironic that ever since the approval by Congress in late 2017 of oil leasing in ANWR, the biggest threat to oil leasing in ANWR has been the Trump administration. It’s willingness to cut corners to make oil drilling a reality before the next shift in the political winds in Washington, D.C. has come at the expense of the careful analysis required by law.”
Because the Obama administration, did not study the relationship of the issues raised in the comments because there was no chance of oil and gas drilling taking place in ANWR, the lack of such analysis is the primary weakness in the Trump plan.
Yet, the Trump administration has only compounded the potential for legal violations of drilling in ANWR by rushing the drilling proposal through the required rigorous environmental review due to potential threats to water quality and critical habitat, by planning to start auctioning off oil leases within a few months. In record time to assess the complex and potentially irreversible impacts on endangered species including caribou and polar bear, in a recent speech at the annual conference of the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, Joe Balash, Interior’s assistant secretary for land and minerals management said the environmental impact statement for ANWR coastal plain leasing drafted by the Bureau of Land Management, will be followed by a final environmental impact statement “by the end of this summer… And once we have a final EIS we’ll be in a position to issue a record of decision and notice of lease sale. And that lease sale will happen in 2019.”
Pointing out that federal agencies typically take much longer than a few months to address public comments on a draft EIS, Adam Kolton, executive director of the Alaska Wilderness League says that “[i]n the history of environmental reviews, there’s been nothing like this” and that the BLM’s record breaking short timeline for ANWR “They’ll be very vulnerable to legal challenges.
The theme of last year’s World Water Day was “Imagine a Day Without Water,” which focused attention on how we would manage for a single day without the many benefits that water brings to our lives. It appears that many coastal communities in Alaska, do not need to “imagine” not having access to running water because they are just one step away from the breaking down of their water systems due to the often intricate relationship of such systems to other critical infrastructure.
A case in point -, to work with the tribal staff on an instream flow data collection project. While waiting for my flight to Nome at the airport in Anchorage, during a business trip to Elim a couple of weeks ago, I received a text from out Project Coordinator, stating that “someone ran into a power pole and the entire village has no electricity or running water.”
While I was staying in the Village and the water was still out, I had a conversation with one of the janitors at the Aniguiin School, who said that once the power line was knocked out, “everything went down like a dominos because without electricity, the water pump blew a fuse. The city ordered a new pump but there’s no telling how long it will take to get here.” At the same time, people couldn’t rely on nearby creeks for drinking water which were frozen due to the temperature being in the teens.
Meanwhile city and school employees were working tirelessly to find back-up water for the school and other critical facilities. Ultimately, it took 5 days for the part to arrive before running water could be restored. But several days later, some were still boiling water because of worries about sanitation.
Last week’s situation in Elim is vivid example of the vulnerability of small Alaska communities to the impacts of climate change on water infrastructure. This winter, for example, the Arctic experienced the warmest March on record, and the second consecutive winter with extremely low levels of ice in the Bering Sea. The unprecedented loss of shoreline sea ice which normally acts a kind of barrier to protect coastal communities in the Arctic, from increasing storm surges means that drinking and other water infrastructure are more vulnerable to flood damage.
Other climate related changes to water resources in Alaska include the earliest recorded breakup for many rivers including the of the Tanana and Kuskokwim. Shorter ice seasons on rivers have profound impacts for the villages which use rivers for their main transportation routes. As of the end of April this year, for example, around a dozen people died or had to be rescued after their snow machines or 4-wheelers fell through ice that was too thin. When rivers become too dangerous or otherwise, unavailable to use villagers are forced to either not travel at all or to rely on planes or other more expensive alternatives.
In light of the substantial impacts to Arctic coastal communities in the most rapidly warminig state in the country, it’s unfortunate that when asked about his strategy for addressing climate change during the campaign for Governor of Alaska, Mike Dunleavy’s response was “We are not a smokestack state, so we don’t contribute that much to climate change.” Ignoring the fact, therefore, that Alaska is one of the largest oil producing states in U.S., immediately after taking office, Dunleavy eliminated the Climate Action for Alaska Leadership Team established by Gov. Bill Walker, and removed the group’s strategy and action recommendations for helping Alaska Native and other communities adapt to climate change.
According to Dermot Cole, who is a columnist for Arctic Today, scrapping of the Team is a major loss for villages threatened by climate change because many of them “are one major storm away from being wiped out. If and when such a storm strikes, the state will respond — it just won’t be as organized as it could be with a mitigation plan.”
So, with the official response from the Dunleavy administration to impacts of climate change on the Alaska Native and other communities and for planning for the rapid changes coming to the state, being a resounding “We don’t care”, it’s a good thing that communities like Elim are already setting the example for resiliency when the grid actually does go down. Maybe the rest of us should take a page from their book.
In unusually harsh criticism, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says the Trump Administration failed to adequately consider oil spills, climate change and the welfare of polar bears in its rush to open Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. The criticism which appeared in written comments filed by the agency stated that Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) failed to consider oil spill response planning, analyze impacts of climate change in the Arctic, require polar bear denning habitat surveys; pointed to substantial information gaps and implied that the agency in charge of drafting the DEIS (the Bureau of Land Management) failed to properly consult with USFWS as required by federal law.
The Fish and Wildlife oversight agency comments come at a time of increasing criticism of the BLM’s proposal to lease 400,000 acres in ANWR which is the largest wildlife sanctuary in the United States and which serves has habitat for multiple species including bears, caribou, lynx and muskox. Because 16 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil reserves also lie underneath the area, it is a major component of President Donald Trump’s “Energy Dominance” strategy.
Not only do the USFWS comments illustrates that even federal agency’s are starting to resist the administration’s rush to develop resources in the Arctic at the expense of environmental laws but, like the rest of Trump Arctic drilling campaign, the flawed permitting process which includes an order from the President that the National Environmental Policy Act process be completed within one year and the Final EIS be no more than 150 pages, may result in litigation. Such shortcutting of a process which is intended to be thorough and normally takes years and thousands of pages of documentation, can mean the failure to fully analyze significant impacts, tribal consultation and coordination will be inadequate, important scientific data will be ignored, and the public notice and comment process will be negatively impacted.
