Why the Coast Guard is paying a Homer helicopter company to reach roadless villages

To inspect the fuel facilities it regulates in remote Alaska, the Coast Guard can't just send an inspector down the road — there often isn't one. So it's paying a Homer helicopter company to fly them in.

The Coast Guard awarded Maritime Helicopters, Inc. $220,000 to carry its personnel round trip to villages around Northwest Alaska, working out of Kotzebue, to inspect Coast Guard-regulated facilities with no road connection. It's the company's second such job this summer; a $125,000 contract in July covered western Alaska inspections out of Bethel. Together they come to $345,000.

The facilities are the bulk fuel tank farms these communities run on. Coast Guard Sector Anchorage is responsible for roughly 380 bulk-oil waterfront facilities across Alaska — 346 of them off the road system — that hold the diesel and heating oil villages depend on to warm homes and schools and run boats and vehicles, often barged in just once a year. The Coast Guard inspects them for the risk of an oil spill, a risk that climbs as aging metal, eroding shorelines and thawing permafrost strain infrastructure that would be brutally expensive to clean up if it failed. A single 3,000-gallon spill near Kodiak in 2019 cost $9 million.

That access problem is what the contract solves. In the Lower 48, an inspector can drive to a fuel facility; in roadless Alaska, reaching one means flying. That's Maritime Helicopters' business. The Homer company has flown Alaska's coast, Arctic and North Slope since 1973 for oil and gas, mining, environmental and film clients as well as state and federal agencies, sometimes off its own helicopter-equipped ship. It's a steady federal contractor, with 35 awards worth about $2.8 million so far this fiscal year, most from the Interior Department.

The Coast Guard competed both contracts under simplified procedures, through a two-year blanket agreement it keeps for Arctic aviation, and drew few bidders — one offer for the Kotzebue work, two for Bethel. Neither award record lists a flight schedule.