On Alaska tour, Buttigieg encounters extreme conditions and touts federal investments

For U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a whirlwind visit to Alaska has provided a lesson in extremes.

At Anchorage’s Port of Alaska, which moves three-quarters of the consumer goods used by state residents, he learned about extraordinary challenges facing the port, which is being overhauled to make it more resilient to environmental forces, including climate change.

Those challenges include the ever-present earthquake risks in Southcentral Alaska, one of the world’s most seismically active regions, as well as the need to protect the endangered Cook Inlet belugas, a rare population of whales that swim close to the state’s urban core.

There are also the “everyday battle with the elements,” he said, listing among them the inlet’s tides, which are among the most extreme in the world and which jostle plates of winter ice that can scour pilings and other structures.

“I don’t think that iron-eating microbes are a consideration in most places that we do infrastructure projects, 30-foot tides or glacial silt deposits. But that’s the reality here,” he said during a brief news conference at the port.

A day earlier, in the Inupiat hub community of Kotzebue on the Northwest coast, he learned about another Alaska extreme: the high cost of rural living.

That lesson was driven home by a visit to a construction site where the state is building an 11-mile gravel road from town to a beach site called Cape Blossom, long envisioned as a possible Arctic port.

“I thought I knew what a mile of road ought to cost. But what it’s taking just to build a gravel road there, to extend to the port they hope to establish at Cape Blossom, really brings into very sharp view the unique challenges that people here face in building what would be considered even the most basic elements of infrastructure,” Buttigieg said in a brief interview.

The project is expected to cost well over $30 million, with some of that money supplied by the federal government, he said. Among the reasons for such high per-mile costs, he said, are the need to ship in gravel from great distances and find ways to ensure stability in a permafrost setting.

The visit to Kotzebue left other impressions, too.  

“One thing that I was struck with was the hospitality, the quiet, dignified humility but also the rightful pride that people take in their community and their way of life,” he said.

This is Buttigieg’s first visit to Alaska. In his travels, he has been accompanied by Alaska officials from various levels of government and other entities.

At the port, his tour companions included Mayor Dave Bronson and three Anchorage Assembly members. After visiting the port, he met with leaders from the Alaska Federation of Natives. In Kotzebue on Monday, his travel companion was U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, and he spent time there with officials from the Northwest Arctic Borough, NANA Corp., and tribal governments.

He is scheduled to spend Wednesday in Southeast Alaska, where he is to travel with U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, as he visits seaplane sites, a dock in Haines that was the subject of a $20 million federal grant and other sites, and takes a ride on an Alaska state ferry.

Speaking to reporters at the port in Anchorage on Tuesday, Buttigieg ticked off several items that are among the billions of federal dollars that have been provided for Alaska transportation projects through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and other means.

Projects he mentioned included updated harbors and docks in the Alaska Marine Highway System, harbor restoration in the Prince William Sound town of Cordova, repairs to the port in Adak in the Aleutians, road improvements in the remote Northwest Alaska village of Noatak and upgrades to roads and bridges in various parts of Western Alaska to make them more resilient after the damages wrought there last fall by Typhoon Merbok.

The infrastructure bill has brought needed improvements to much of the nation, he said.

“Under President Biden’s leadership, with bipartisan support, we have more ability to say yes to more great projects, more funding to work with than at any point in my lifetime,” he said.

The list also includes a $68.7 million grant made last fall to the Port of Alaska to assist in its ongoing modernization a project expected to cost $1.8 billion over several years. It was the biggest single grant that year in that particular program in the department, Buttigieg said during the news conference at the port.  

The port is considered vital infrastructure in Alaska, serving 90% of the state. It ships fuel to both the Ted Stevens International Airport and to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson and is the main site for delivery of cement used in industrial projects. And it is a hub in a marine- air-road-railroad transportation network.

But the environmental elements that Buttigieg learned about have made the port vulnerable to structural damage. The modernization project is intended to respond to those vulnerabilities and to prepare for marine traffic in future decades.

While Alaska has experience with extreme conditions, it is not alone the challenges it faces from climate change, Buttigieg said during his remarks to reporters at the port.

“In recent weeks it feels like we’ve been seeing around the country an almost endless string of what we used to think of as once-in-a-lifetime or once-in-a-century climate-related disasters across the Lower 48. And we know that across the country, we have got to do more to prepare for and to prevent disasters, and to handle the changes that we know that are already underway and are coming our way more quickly,” he said.