The rapidly changing conditions increase the vulnerability of the Dalton and all of Alaska’s infrastructure by enhancing environmental stressors, said Doug Goering, dean emeritus of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks’ College of Engineering and Mines. Roads, runways, railroads, buildings and pipelines of all sorts are becoming more susceptible to damage from flooding and thawing permafrost.The report found that flooding will account for about 45 percent of the damages, and thawing permafrost will be responsible for 38 percent of the havoc-the two biggest threats to the Dalton Highway. By the middle of the century, the highest daily maximum temperature could increase between 4 and 8 degrees Fahrenheit.Ī 2016 report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences focused on the consequences of climate change to Alaskan infrastructure estimated that impacts to public infrastructure in the state will total about $5 billion by century’s end. The Impacts of Climate ChangeĪlaska is among the fastest warming regions on Earth and is warming faster than any other state, according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment published in 2018. “We understand the advantages to adapting to the flooding,” he said.
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He described the recent flooding as the most frequent and worst he’s seen during the 20 years he’s worked on the northern section of the highway, which for most of its half century of existence sat level with the tundra and unmolested by flooding. “The high-water flow is a fairly new phenomenon,” he said. William Russell, superintendent of the Department of Transportation’s Northern Region Maintenance and Operations Division, has witnessed the Sag’s ferocity and the push by the transportation agency and Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, a syndicate of oil companies that own and operate the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), to defend the roadway and pipeline against flooding. The mostly gravel roadway, which runs less than a mile from the pipeline and the river, was elevated between seven and ten feet to keep it above the new flood levels of the Sag. One of the projects, triggered by the severe flooding of the Sag in 2019, was recently completed at a cost of $70 million in state and federal funds. Since a massive flood on the Sagavanirktok, known as the Sag, in 2015 closed the highway for 28 days and prompted two disaster declarations by the governor, Alaska transportation engineers have been checking off a long list of increasingly urgent and costly projects designed to shield the highway from climate-change related catastrophes. “The interior of Alaska’s climate is changing, and those changes are felt equally by the highway and pipeline.”Īt a time when flooding on the Sagavanirktok River in northern Alaska’s Brooks Range has driven the owners of the pipeline to fortify it against the restless river, Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities officials have pumped millions of dollars into projects to keep the highway dry and stable.
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“They are inexorably linked at the hip not just at the hip but hundreds of miles of the hip,” he said. The codependence between the highway and pipeline is such that if one fails the other faces failure, said Larry Persily, a former federal coordinator for Alaska gas projects.