A small Yup'ik village on the Seward Peninsula is getting federal help to clean up two contaminated sites that have sat on its land for decades, the result of a 1971 land transfer that handed Alaska Native communities millions of acres along with pollution they didn't create.
The EPA is awarding $2.8 million to Kawerak, Inc., the regional tribal consortium for the Bering Strait, to assess and clean up a buried landfill at the Elim City Shop and a fuel tank farm operated by the Alaska Village Electric Cooperative (AVEC) in Elim, Alaska. Both sites have left contamination on land used by the community's roughly 300 to 350 residents.
The cleanup traces its roots to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which transferred 44 million acres of land to Alaska Native corporations in exchange for extinguishing aboriginal land claims. Many of those conveyed lands were already contaminated by military installations, fuel storage, and old landfills. The federal government transferred the land titles and the environmental liability together, leaving Native communities responsible for cleaning up pollution they had no part in creating. EPA's ANCSA Contaminated Lands program was established in the early 2000s to address this, though funding has remained modest relative to the hundreds of contaminated sites identified across the state.
Both site types are common environmental hazards in rural Alaska. Buried village landfills often contain a mix of household waste and hazardous materials disposed of before modern waste management reached remote communities. Fuel tank farms are a fixture of bush Alaska life: every village depends on bulk fuel deliveries, typically arriving by barge during a narrow summer shipping window, for heating and electricity generation. Decades of storage and transfer have left petroleum contamination at tank farm sites across western Alaska.
Elim's situation is compounded by its isolation. The village has no road connection to the outside world. Supplies come by barge in summer and by small aircraft year-round. Mobilizing the heavy equipment, environmental professionals, and hazardous waste disposal logistics required for a cleanup project to a community like Elim can double or triple costs compared to road-accessible locations. The short construction season, roughly May through September, means remediation work often stretches across multiple years.
Permafrost thaw and coastal erosion add urgency. Both forces can mobilize buried contaminants and spread pollution beyond the original sites, a growing concern across Norton Sound communities facing accelerating climate pressures.
Kawerak, Inc. will manage the project directly, contracting a qualified environmental professional to lead field operations. The work includes site assessment, development of cleanup and safety plans, community outreach, and proper disposal of recovered hazardous materials under federal, state, and local regulations. The goal is full remediation that allows the properties to be safely reused.
Kawerak serves 20 federally recognized tribes across the Bering Strait region and has managed multiple EPA remediation projects in the area, building the institutional capacity that smaller tribal governments in the region lack. Elim's tribal government, like most in the region, operates with only a handful of staff.
