Health consortium provides solutions to bring clean water to remote Alaska villages.
Alaska, the largest of the 50 states, ranks second-to-last in population with its 710,000 residents spread out over more than half-a-million square miles.
Many Alaska Natives live in remote villages without basic infrastructure that most people take for granted. About 25% of the state’s residents do not have access to clean, treated drinking water. The result is poor health and more trips to difficult-to-reach hospitals.
“Some use honey buckets and put their liquid and paper waste in a hole in the ground,” states D. Whittington, the construction manager for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium’s Environmental Health and Engineering Division. “In the summer, the smell gets quite bad. Kids play next to the waste. When an ATV or snow machine comes through there is a lot of splashing. Sanitary conditions are not the best when things thaw out in the summer. It’s a difficult situation. It creates a lot of illness.
“Keep in mind, America has more than 200 years of infrastructure with building things such as highways. Alaska has been a state for just over 50 years. We have 50 years of infrastructure and most of that is within the last 20 years. Going into some of these communities to develop sewer and water systems is like going into Haiti or Nicaragua or places hit with disasters.”