Corps Of Engineers Continues Military Clean Ups In Kodiak

Jay Barrett/KMXT

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is back in Kodiak cleaning up contaminated military sites. The Formerly Used Defense Sites, or FUDS, program, has been cleaning Army, Navy and Coast Guard sites around Kodiak for more than a decade.

Charlie Peyton, a project manager with the Corps of Engineers Alaska District, gave an update to the Kodiak Island Borough Assembly at its Thursday night meeting:

— (FUDS 1 10 sec “… Lower 48 or remediating it.”)

Payton says over 6-thousand tons of soil contaminated over the years will be removed this summer:

— (FUDS 2 30 sec “… under the control of the Coast Guard.”)

In the last 10-plus years, the Corps has excavated, cleaned or disposed of about 125-thousand tons of contaminated soil in Kodiak area. The sites are cleaned either by digging up and “cooking” the contaminates out of the soil in furnaces, remediated in place by injecting oxygen into the ground to promote the growth of contaminant-eating microbes, or shipped off the island for disposal in certified landfills in the Lower 48.

The Corps of Engineers, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, along with Jacobs Engineering of Anchorage, have been working on Kodiak FUDS programs for a dozen years.

###