Assembly seeks grant to improve water treatment facility

The Wrangell assembly approved a resolution requesting grant funding with the hopes of getting more water to a system that is often tapped.

Jeff Jabusch, Interim Borough Manager, said there’s plenty of water but it’s not getting treated fast enough to meet the demand of the community.

“By the end of the day, often times they’re getting down to where there’s just a few feet left in each one of them,” Jabusch said. “If we were to run out or if there were a major fire or if the canneries wanted to expand or any of those things we would have some problems.”

Jabusch said the importance of the resolution affects the grading system used by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation when it determines which projects they will fund around the state.

The grant funding would fund a pilot study to review a new system and also connect Wrangell’s larger upper reservoir to the water treatment facility. The upper reservoir currently only connects to the lower reservoir. Jabusch said this makes it difficult to perform maintenance on the lower reservoir because it can’t be drained.

“We could clean it out and do the different work we could do on it,” Jabusch said. “A lot of times it gets filled with sediment… we’re kind of stuck without this other access.”

Bumping the project to the top of the list allows municipalities to get more points when ADEC reviews projects. ADEC assesses grant requests based on this grading system system as it determines which projects to fund around the state.