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35 Alaska Just. F. 1 (2018)

handle is hein.journals/aljufor35 and id is 1 raw text is: Environmental justice: Challenges of contaminated site cleanup in rural AK Paula Williams and Pamela Cravez While working in Western Alaska a decade ago, residents of Elim, a small village near Nome on the Bering Sea, told Paula about how they had stopped fishing and hunting near an abandoned military site. When the military closed the site, they dug a big hole and buried everything. Now, the fish in the river and animals near the abandoned site were no longer healthy and were unsafe to eat, one resident told Paula. At the time, efforts to clean up hazardous wastes left by the abandoned military site at Moses Point had been going on for more than 20 years. Cleanup continues today. Rural communities in Alaska, which rely greatly upon the environment for their live- lihood, are disproportionately impacted by environmental contamination. These com- munities also struggle more to get the re- sources to have contaminated sites cleaned. Alaska is ranked third in the United States for the number of properties eligible for cleanup under the Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS) program. Many of the proper- Contaminated sites in Alaska, FY 2017. Contaminated Sites Database, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (http://dec.alaska.gov/spar/csp.aspx). ties were contaminated during World War II, or during the Cold War, when the long-term effects of chemicals were not understood, and the accepted means of disposal was to bury or abandon anything that was too ex- pensive to transport out of Alaska. Most of these properties are in remote locations. Cleanup projects that are begun may take many years to complete due to the complicated nature of each site, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE, 2015). l Superfund and FUDS In the 1980s, Congress created programs such as the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), also known as Superfund, and the Formerly Used Defense Site (FUDS) program, to provide oversight, coordination, and funding to address abandoned or uncon- trolled hazardous waste from military, civil- ian, commercial and other sources. However, the breadth, complexity and cost of cleanup is no match for funds available, especially in rural Alaska (Hogan, Christopherson, & Rothe, 2006; EPA, 2018a; USACE, n.d. (b)). As of the end of 2017, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had spent about $980 million on FUDS investigation and cleanup work, according to John Budnik, Public Affairs Specialist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engi- neers - Alaska District. The estimated cost for cleanup of all remaining known FUDS projects in Alaska is $1.4 billion. Funding for 2018 is $35 million, according to Budnik, who provided the following accounting of FUDS properties. Please see Environmental justice, page 2

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