its overall importance to state commerce, which extends
past the borders of the Municipality. While hurricanes and
tsunamis may not bring this port – critical to not only the
Alaska military mission, but to the livelihood of 85 percent of
the population – to its knees, what is causing wide concern is
time and a local phenomenon called Accelerated Low Water
Corrosion. So, with our 56-yea r history, how did we get here,
and what are we doing about it?
Once upon a time in 1961, the Port of Anchorage opened
for business. It was an optimistic time: Seward was the gate-
way to a new state, and the Cook Inlet oil boom was taking
off. In July of that year, two months before the ribbon was cut,
the Port welcomed its first foreign-flagged vessel when the
Japanese freighter Kazukawa Maru delivered 600 tons of pipe
and construction materials for Cook Inlet oil fields. It was a
small load by modern standards, but the Port of Anchorage
was off and running, with its volume steadily increasing until
5:36 p.m. AST on Good
Friday, March 27, 1964.
That was when a
magnitude 9.2 earthquake
– the second most powerful
earthquake ever recorded
– struck Alaska beneath
Prince William Sound and
caused mass destruction,
with shaking and tsunamis
that killed 139 people as
far away as Oregon and
California. Fortunately,
Upper Cook Inlet geog-
raphy virtually eliminates
tsunami danger, and the
26-foot-wave that inundated
the Homer Spit was reduced to a ripple by the time it reached
Anchorage.
The Port of Anchorage was the only deep-water port
in Southcentral Alaska to survive that natural disaster, so it
instantly turned into the state’s principal inbound cargo hub
as it expanded to support earthquake reconstruction and then
Alaska’s North Slope oil boom and population surge. Today
the Port handles almost four million tons of fuel and freight
annually – half of all marine cargo delivered into Alaska.
About half of the fuel and goods crossing Anchorage docks
move on to final destinations outside of the Municipality and
into every region of the state.
For more than half a century, the Port of Anchorage
demonstrated its economic viability and played key roles in
supporting statewide growth and U.S. military missions in
Alaska, the Pacific Rim, and the Arctic, while also generat-
ing jobs and revenue for the Municipality of Anchorage. The
present-day Port, with its three general cargo terminals and
two fuel terminals, is Alaska’s most versatile, routinely and
efficiently handling flats, containers, break bulk, petroleum,
dry bulk, and even cruise ships.
As Anchorage evolved into Alaska’s population center,
our Port became the state’s main cargo transportation hub,
supporting hundreds of millions of dollars of public and pri-
vate cargo-related infrastructure, including 3.4 million barrels
of liquid fuel storage, 60,000 tons of cement storage, adjacent
Ship Creek area barge and rail terminals, and intermodal
connections to the state’s principal marine, road, rail, air, and
pipeline transport systems.
What I’d like folks to take away from this little history
lesson is that the geography (remember, no tsunamis in Upper
Cook Inlet), location (remember, Anchorage is the population
center), and private sector infrastructure investment (remem-
ber, everything landside was constructed by the Port’s users
with no public money) made here over the last 56 years, when
stacked against a state population of less than 1 million people
– 85 percent of which benefit directly from this Port – makes
it fiscally irresponsible to
think about having more
than one port as robust as
this one. The smarter – and,
I’d argue, less expensive –
business investment is in
assuring resiliency in the
one proven profitable enter-
prise already in place.
Here’s our challenge:
The Port of Anchorage
docks were initially con-
structed to last 35 years.
The half-century-old facility
has long exceeded its struc-
tural design and economic
life, and today the facility
is suffering from a slow-motion disaster of corrosion and
obsolescence. Barring a major earthquake or other unexpect-
ed event, the Port is unlikely to suffer catastrophic failure that
causes large numbers of casualties or disastrous property loss.
Instead, it will endure a slow-motion failure from corrosion
and age that will suck value out of business and infrastructure
investments, while making life in Alaska more expensive and
less convenient.
The Municipality of Anchorage recognized the Port’s
structural and economic issues decades ago and started pur-
suing solutions. The initial attempt to replace the docks, called
the Port Intermodal Expansion Project, did not succeed,
and the Municipality is now struggling to replace the docks
before they fail and cause statewide disruption. The challenge
is that the Port is owned and operated by the Municipality of
Anchorage, but it directly serves some 85 percent of all state
residents, supports the statewide economy, and is critical to
national economic and security interests.
Officials are settling on a plan to replace the Port’s aging
docks while maintaining ongoing operations and minimizing
January 2018
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