After two weeks without water or sewer service, the Village of Alakanuk has thawed its frozen pipes. The pipes began to freeze during a sudden recent cold snap. Now the village wants to upgrade its system to avoid future freeze-ups, but wonders if frozen federal funds under a Trump Administration could be as damaging as the cold weather.
In Alakanuk the last two weeks have looked like this:
"We're back to hauling water and honey buckets again," said Allen Hanson, Alakanuk City Administrator. He says the pipes started to freeze when the weather dropped almost 80 degrees from unusually warm, to dangerously cold.
The water/sewer system has a number of issues that, when combined with the cold, failed. But with some hard work, and help from organizations like Yukon Kuskokwim Health Corporation, the water is back on for most of the village.
"If we had up-to-date components in our water/sewer plant, none of this would have happened," said Hanson.
Hanson wants to make sure another freeze-up doesn't happen by replacing bad equipment, but at the moment he's facing another kind of freeze-up: President Donald Trump.
An executive order from the President has put a hold on Environmental Protection Agency grants. This means that Trump has temporarily closed a gateway to federal funding that many villages use. The way the process usually works is that EPA funding goes to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), from there to a program called Village Safe Water, and from there to the villages. Bill Griffith, with the DEC, explains how important this process is to Western Alaska.
"They're 100 percent dependent on grant funding. If there's not grant funding available from state and federal sources, there are no improvements being made," Griffith said.
Griffith says that the challenge facing rural municipalities is that it's already so expensive for residents to get services, and there are so few residents to begin with, that, unlike in larger population centers, increased charges to pay for improvements would be astronomical.
"If Anchorage wants to upgrade its water plant it can get a loan, and bump up everybody's water bill a little bit, and repay that loan. But that doesn't work out so well in the villages," Griffith said.
The Trump administration has shut down all communication from the EPA to the DEC, so Griffith doesn't know what will happen in the future. But unlike Hanson, he's hopeful.
"I guess we'll find out soon whether or not there will be the same amount of money as last year, or it might be somehow reduced, or maybe even increased. There's talk about potentially more funding for infrastructure, so it's really anybody's guess," Griffith said.
The EPA sent KYUK a statement that it will continue its grants to tribes after the freeze has ended, which it says could be as early as Friday, but there has been no announcement yet. The EPA also did not specify if those grants would change after the review.