laskans can be water snobs. While parts of the Lower 48 fight for access to clean and safe drinking water, the Upper 1 boasts nearly 3 million lakes, 12,000 rivers, and 100,000 glaciers—pristine sources that make up nearly 50 percent of the total surface waters in the United States.

But getting water from a glacier or a lake and into homes is another story. In rural Alaska, extreme temperatures and challenging geography complicate the design and construction of water systems. Some remote villages rely on washeterias where residents can access drinking water, filling containers and hauling them to their homes. About twenty-three Alaska villages have no water-access facilities at all.

Even in Anchorage, windstorms, cold winters, and complex topography ensure that maintaining the city water system is far from a straightforward task.

“There’s really no part of the state that’s easy,” says David Persinger, assistant general manager at Anchorage Water and Wastewater Utility (AWWU).

The variation creates “running sand,” which is extremely unstable. Maintenance crews require specialized equipment to manage repairs.

“It can get very messy very quickly,” Persinger describes. “So there are a lot of unique challenges Anchorage faces—but that’s true for the rest of the state as well.”

Outside of Anchorage, water sources are as varied as Alaska’s terrain. Some villages draw from groundwater wells; in others, whole villages depend upon a nearby river or lake.

Until recently, Tatitlek relied on a small stream about a mile and a half from town for its drinking water. This became a problem in 2019, when Prince William Sound suffered from unprecedented drought that caused aquifers to run dry and reservoirs to evaporate. The situation prompted the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) to initiative several water improvement projects with funding from the Indian Health Service, including an engineering effort to improve Tatitlek’s water source: a small infiltration gallery located in the stream.

Engineering contractor R&M Consultants looked at drilling groundwater wells as an alternative to Tatitlek’s stream but couldn’t find enough high-quality aquifers to provide the quantity of water needed. The nearest lake that could provide water was five miles away, making pumping and piping water cost prohibitive.

“We looked at all these sources, and ultimately we ended up recommending improvements to the existing infiltration gallery to increase its capacity,” describes Morgan Welch, a senior project engineer with R&M.

Engineers also built additional water storage to mitigate future droughts.

The solution to Tatitlek’s water problems ended up being relatively simple. But assisting other communities—even those in Prince William Sound—is not as easy as replicating that solution.

“We have something like 250 villages in Alaska,” Welch says. “Depending on the subsurface geology or the watershed or the topography around any one of those communities, it can be completely different. There’s no universal solution for what works best.”

In northern Alaska, many of the communities in which Umiaq Design General Manager Wiley Wilhelm has worked draw their water from freshwater lakes and rivers—even, in some cases, from wells. In this region, Wilhelm has seen the effects of climate change on water sources. In one instance, Umiaq engineers tried to stabilize the shores around a lake that eventually drained due to thermal degradation.

“You’re sitting there watching it, and the water level comes up, and you can see the water running through the grass and piles of gravel,” he recalls. “We did the best we could with what we had, but it was a frustrating process.”

This left a community without an approved water source. As an emergency measure, Umiaq sourced water from a nearby river and installed a reverse osmosis water treatment system—an expensive option that generates a lot of “reject” water. Umiaq is currently designing an upgrade to replace that system.

The company has also been tackling the problem of old infrastructure throughout the North Slope Borough. Here, buried water lines that have serviced communities since the late ‘90s are causing issues simply because of age.

“It’s remarkable what communities have done to keep systems running that are thirty-plus years old and in the harshest of environments,” says David Beveridge, vice president of Environmental Health, Engineering, and Facilities Services at the ANTHC. “Communities do miraculous things to operate those systems, but there’s a point where things just fall apart, and you can’t deliver the water that you once did.”

Breaks in water lines are a source of some of the most vexing problems for communities and engineers alike. The challenge isn’t only that—as in Anchorage—underground lines are difficult to access. The method by which the water is made safe to drink makes even a small break in a water line significant.

To make river or lake water potable, filtration systems strain particles using a series of filters. These filters are flushed using some of the water that’s being filtered—sometimes, Wilhelm explains, up to 30 or 40 percent of the water flowing through the pipes.

“So when a line breaks and you’re losing water—you lose a gallon of water that really cost you a gallon and a half of what you had to pump from the lake to make that gallon,” he says.

As the northern regions of Alaska warm, underground systems experience damage. Because of this, some communities are shifting to above-ground water and sewer systems; in a pilot project in Utqiaġvik, twenty-seven homes are being connected to an above-ground system.

Outside of the Arctic, above-grade systems are more common in other areas of Alaska, and ANTHC has spearheaded construction. In its mission to meet the unique health needs of Alaska Native people, ANTHC works with rural communities to improve access to clean water.

ANTHC has received funding from several sources to implement water projects, such as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which Senator Lisa Murkowski worked to secure specifically for work in rural Alaska. Under the IIJA, ANTHC has received about $1.1 billion for the first three years of a five-year plan. This includes funding that will bring piped water to fifteen remote villages for the very first time.

IIJA money goes to new water and wastewater systems, revamping landfills, and other projects. But ANTHC has concentrated on drinking water and sewer systems because of the drastic impact clean drinking water has on a community.

In communities where fewer than 10 percent of homes are piped for water, hospitalization rates for infants with pneumonia is 11 times the national average, Beveridge points out.

“There’s a huge disparity between having access to water and not, when it comes to the people in a community, especially the most vulnerable,” he says.

Increased funding from the IIJA has gone a long way to close the gap between communities where ANTHC has already started or completed projects and places where clean, easily accessed drinking water is still an issue. Of the thirty-four communities that have no piped water and sewer facilities at this time, fifteen have secured funding through the IIJA. ANTHC is working with the remaining communities to find solutions and compete for funding over the next two years of IIJA.

As new systems replace outdated ones throughout the state, contractors like R&M emphasize designs that can mitigate against continued projected climate change.

In the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, for example, where much of the sanitation infrastructure was built in the ‘80s and ‘90s, design assumptions that contractors used four decades ago are no longer adequate, given climate change. Those systems were designed to preserve permafrost below the water pipes, says Welch. Now, as temperatures rise and precipitation averages change, the permafrost is thawing, resulting in soil settlement that damages treatment plants, water piping, sewer piping, and local roads.

The new systems R&M is planning are designed to be resilient, with the potential to last twenty to forty years.

“[Climate change] has a massive impact, and it plays a huge role in every single project we’re doing out there,” Welch says.

ANTHC works closely with each community to determine water sources and design systems to provide access to those points of access and to find ways to reduce cost and energy use.

“ANTHC isn’t just building new systems,” says Shea Siegert, ANTHC senior manager of external relations. “We’re also helping with the operations and maintenance through the Alaska Rural Utility Collaborative. It’s also helping with the post-construction, taking care of the system, making sure it lives out its entire lifetime, and making sure that there are operators there.”

ANTHC provides training for operators, but it also offers remote monitoring of the systems it constructs. This allows ANTHC and other partners to help operators know when there’s a problem—such as low levels in a water tank or a drop in temperature in a water plant. Catching an issue early and guiding local operators through responding to the problem can mean averting an emergency before it happens. Remote monitoring also allows for tracking energy usage; ANTHC can use the information it receives to make recommendations that can save communities money by making small changes that result in better energy efficiency.

Bringing modern water systems to every Alaska community has been an intergenerational effort. The job has taken so long partly because of disparate conditions in every village.

“Every place is unique,” Beveridge says. “From the soil, the water levels, the access and logistics, to the energy systems in use. If you’re going to rivers for a source, you’re often dealing with silt. If you’re going into the ground with wells, we encounter lots of minerals, some of which are considered contaminants. Even with something as simple as water, it’s a challenge.”