The North Slope's fuel farms sit on thawing ground

The state has opened public comment on renewing the spill-prevention plan for the North Slope Borough's fuel storage across eight Arctic communities. The renewal is routine. What sits under it is not.

The tanks in Wainwright, Utqiagvik, Nuiqsut, Kaktovik, and four other villages hold the diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel those communities run on — Wainwright alone stores more than 850,000 gallons of diesel. Much of it sits on permafrost, near a coast that is coming apart. Peer-reviewed research on Alaska's Arctic coastline warns that erosion and thawing ground can undermine and collapse tank farms like these, and because rural fuel systems have no backup, losing one facility can take out a community's power with it. Utqiagvik has been losing shoreline for years and building sandbag walls to slow it.

The plan sets standards for preventing and responding to a spill — containment able to hold 110 percent of a tank's volume, and a 1,500-foot setback from the high-water line that is itself moving inland.

Comments to the Department of Environmental Conservation are due by Sept. 7. Anyone seeking a public hearing must ask by Aug. 21.