FAA hires Calista-owned firm for next round of decades-old Cold Bay fuel cleanup

The Federal Aviation Administration is paying an Anchorage company owned by an Alaska Native corporation to take another run at a problem it has had in Cold Bay since the 1990s: fuel that leaked from old tanks and pipes into the ground around its station there.

The FAA awarded Brice Solutions a $471,000 contract Wednesday to clean up contaminated soil and monitor groundwater at one of the station's contaminated sites. Work started the same day and runs through March 2028.

Brice Solutions is an environmental firm in the Calista Brice family of companies, which are owned by Calista Corporation. Calista is the Alaska Native regional corporation whose lands cover western Alaska between the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. Brice Solutions gives hiring preference to Calista shareholders and their families, as well as to shareholders of other Alaska Native corporations.

Cold Bay sits inside the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge at the western end of the Alaska Peninsula, 634 miles southwest of Anchorage. The 2020 census counted 50 residents. The town's main runway, nearly 2 miles long, is the fifth-longest in Alaska and a backup emergency landing strip for jets crossing the Pacific. The Aleutians East Borough describes Cold Bay as the center of air travel for the Alaska Peninsula, with most local jobs in government and airline support.

Over the decades, the FAA's station there included living quarters, shops and a gas station for agency vehicles, much of it fueled from buried tanks. State environmental records trace the contamination to those tanks and their piping. At the old gas station, a mid-1990s investigation found unleaded gasoline had leaked from threaded pipe joints into the soil and groundwater. At some former living quarters, crews pulled out heating-oil tanks in the mid- to late 1990s and dug out fuel-soaked soil. Later tests still found fuel compounds, including benzene, in groundwater flowing away from the old tank sites.

Sampling in 2015 found diesel fuel above the state's groundwater cleanup level at each of six sites checked. At one of them, a former treatment plant, fuel was floating on top of the groundwater. Investigators tested the air in the house next door. In a report the state approved in 2016, they found some naphthalene, a chemical common in petroleum, in the crawlspace and indoor air. They concluded it likely came from something inside the house and that vapors from the contamination were not reaching the home at levels that posed a health risk.

A 2018 pilot study tested two ways of getting at that fuel: injecting chemicals underground to break it down, and pumping the floating fuel out. Neither worked well enough to recommend, and the state noted that other cleanup methods might be needed.

In 2024, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation approved a plan for cleanup work at 12 spots around the station. The list included seven former living quarters, the old gas station, the treatment plant, a former community services building and two spill areas, plus groundwater monitoring at eight of the sites. In August 2025, the department approved a report on field work to find and remove fuel-contaminated soil and water at 13 sites.

The history and current status of each Cold Bay site is posted in the state's contaminated sites database.