Before this September, when you visited Shoals Point, you’d never know the deep forest and grassy fringe was a former military installation until you came across a concrete bunker, or a rusted fuel tank. Fort Babcock once occupied this site. It was one of three large gun batteries built to defend Sitka Sound from a Japanese naval invasion during the Second World War. The area is windswept from the south, with big, surfable rollers crashing on the beach, and has a sheltered anchorage on the north.
Although it’s off the beaten path, many Sitkans love Shoals Point. Jed DeLong is one of them.
“I mean, (Kruzof) it’s like one of the most unique islands in Southeast,” he said. “It’s one of my favorite places in the world. The Shoals Point area is just awesome. We go out there all the time, and to have it just get mowed down with like no notice is kind of mind blowing to me.”
DeLong visits Shoals Point maybe a dozen times a year. Recently he and his dad went hunting there, and he was shocked at what they found. Contractors for the Army Corps of Engineers in September had cleared the half-mile long former military road, and three adjacent areas.
“Now it’s just a full-blown two-lane road,” said DeLong. “There’s probably three different clear cuts that are off of that road as well, that are probably one- to two-acres a piece, maybe even more. One of them was pretty big.”
Two of those three areas housed an above-ground fuel tank and “tar drum” storage area, which are both contaminated with POLs, or “petroleum oil lubricants” and related chemicals. The third site is the former power plant, which is contaminated with PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, a class of persistent environmental toxin.
Next May, a crew of 14 contracted workers and two Army Corps of Engineers staff will set up field camp, bring in heavy equipment to harden the road, and begin the removal of an estimated 559 “super sacks” of contaminated soil – with each of those sacks weighing in at just over a ton – and barge them to a landfill in Oregon.
Michele Parker is the Environmental Program manager for the Tongass National Forest, which has jurisdiction over the area. She says these chemicals will remain hazardous for a long time if not removed. The Forest Service supports the Corps’ cleanup efforts. She’ll be the on-scene coordinator for the project.
“We’ve all been on site with the Sitka district and their natural resource experts, their ecologists and archeology folks, and everybody has weighed in on the plan,” said Parker. “And so we feel like we have a really good relationship with the Corps of Engineers, and look forward to this project happening and the site getting mitigated and cleaned up.”
The project will cost $2.2 million, and will be completed by Brice Engineering, an Anchorage-based subsidiary of Calista, the regional Native corporation of Southwest Alaska.
The project manager for the Army Corps, Beth Astley, didn’t want to be recorded for this story, but she told KCAW in an interview that the levels of PCBs discovered at Fort Babcock “are relatively high, compared to other defense sites in Alaska.”
That’s troubling to Jed DeLong. He – and many others – often camp at Shoals Point. He knew it was once used by the military, but he didn’t know that it was toxic.
“If this was such a hazardous contaminated site, why haven’t they said anything to the public to allude to that before now?” he asked.
The Army Corps held an informational public meeting in Sitka in 2019, and the 259-page decision document has been available in the Sitka Public Library since 2021. (KCAW did extensive reporting on the proposal in January, 2022.) The project was noticed again to the public last August, just prior to the beginning of work.
But the reality is startling, and Jed DeLong believes that many people may not have understood that Fort Babcock and Shoals Point are the same place. Now, he’s concerned about the decision to clear so much of the area, and to disturb the contaminated soils. The question of “Is the cure worse than the disease?” will probably linger over this project for a long time.
The Forest Service asked that the Army Corps remove all improvements when the work is over, such as culverts, and rough-up the road to stimulate revegetation, use weed-free native seed, and return removed brush to cleared areas to reduce erosion.
Michele Parker has seen old landfills restored in the Tongass. She thinks Shoals Point will recover, too.
“So we’re only doing what is absolutely necessary to deal with the contaminated soil, and we’re going to try and restore it as much as we can, back to its natural state, and then it’ll be contamination free,” said Parker.
Will it be enough? Jed DeLong is a new father, and he’s disappointed that his child won’t experience Shoals Point as he has. This kind of environmental remediation is generational in its impact.
“The whole thing is disheartening,” said DeLong. “I still plan on going out there a lot, but the whole vibe of the area has just been totally trashed. I can’t see it. This (full restoration) isn’t going to happen in my lifetime. It’s done.”
Fort Babcock is not the only formerly-used defense site (FUDS) in Sitka. Astley, with the Army Corps, says Fort Rousseau, which once occupied the causeway next to Sitka’s airport, has already had some military debris removed, and is currently undergoing site inspection for possible contamination.
