Anchorage clears a substation plat on quake-prone Port ground

Anchorage's Platting Board cleared the way this week for a new Chugach Electric substation at the Port of Alaska, on ground the city's own maps rate as highly likely to fail in an earthquake.

The board approved the survey that redraws the property lines and moves part of Terminal Road around the site. The city's staff report says the land sits in a zone with "high or very high susceptibility to seismically-induced ground failure." No soils report came with the application. The Port says it has extensive soils studies in its archives and can hand them over on request, but nobody requested them, and the approval does not require it.

No engineer or geologist in the record addresses the earthquake risk.

The road is moving because the substation, as designed, would run into the existing right-of-way. So the plat gives up that strip and dedicates an identical 80 feet just to the west. The old alignment was never usable anyway. It was dedicated in 2015 along a steep slope where, staff wrote, building "appears infeasible."

Almost no one weighed in. The Port mailed 239 invitations to a June community meeting and one person showed up, asked whether the substation would affect Government Hill, and left after about 15 minutes. The city mailed 314 hearing notices and got no written comments. The Government Hill Community Council said nothing.

What the substation is for, what it will cost, when it will be built, and how it fits the Port's larger modernization are all missing from the record. The case returns to the board Oct. 7.