FAA awards $79,899 to Palmer-based Port Graham Development Corporation for Cleveland radar power work

A company owned by one of the smallest Alaska Native villages has won a federal contract to keep an air-traffic-control radar running in Cleveland, Ohio.

Port Graham Development Corporation will replace and install the backup power system at an FAA airport surveillance radar site — the radar controllers use to track aircraft in the skies around an airport — and run a full study of the site's power systems. The roughly $80,000 job runs through February. It's the kind of unglamorous but consequential work that keeps aviation safe: the uninterruptible power supply is what keeps a radar alive through a grid failure, so planes don't drop off a controller's screen when the lights go out.

The company behind it is a long way from Ohio. Port Graham is a tiny Alutiiq village tucked into a fjord on the southern tip of the Kenai Peninsula, on land its people have lived on for generations. Its village corporation runs the businesses that sustain the community — the general store, fuel deliveries, the corporation's lands — and, like a number of Alaska Native corporations, it also takes on federal contract work far from home, with the earnings flowing back to its shareholders.