Harvey Gilliland came from Seattle to work at the Duncan Canal White Alice project

PETERSBURG – At the age of 23, Harvey Gilliland left his job at Western Union Telegraph Company in Seattle to take a job at the White Alice Communications System (WACS) in Duncan Canal, just 9-miles from Petersburg.

The site was 2.25 miles from the beach, according to Gilliland, and sat on a mountain at a 2,460 ft. elevation. The steep terrain between the site and beach required 6.25-mile road with 5 major switchbacks, Gilliland noted.

Following two weeks of indoctrinization in Anchorage, "another guy and I were shipped down there in April 1961."

Gilliland learned the tropospheric scatter transmission technique and actually fine-tuned its use. "We found we got less distortion by reducing power to the amplifiers which used as much as 10,000 watts of power to enable them to bounce UHF signals off the troposphere," Gilliland explained.

The mission of the U.S. Air Force was strictly communications. There were no radars at the site. They utilized several stations like that at Duncan Canal, one in Hoonah to the northwest and another at Smuggler's Cove on Annette Island to the south to get data from an over-the-horizon radar at Clear Air Force Base near Fairbanks to a monitoring facility at the NORAD headquarters in Colorado.

"Since the military data package didn't utilize all the bandwidth of the main radio system, a lot of it was subsequently used to provide additional long distance phone service to Petersburg, Wrangell, Kake, Craig, Klawock and Hydaburg, plus to the FAA stations at Indian Point in Duncan Canal and Level Island in Sumner Strait," Gilliland said.

Gilliland said there was normally a crew of 12 persons at the site, including a cook, bull cook, 6 electronic technicians, two outside mechanics (who maintained the vehicles, buildings and the roads), two powerhouse operator/mechanics and a site supervisor.

He noted, each of the four – 10,000 watt final radio amplifiers required a 17,000-volt transformer which were oil-filled for insulation and a four-cavity klystron tube that was cooled with ethylene glycol (anti-freeze) that was pumped from a fairly large electric, fan operated heat exchanger.

Concerning hazardous materials at the site, they may have come from several sources, according to Gilliland. Large transformer and capacitor insulation oil might have contained PCBs. Ethylene glycol is moderately toxic. A garbage dump was located about 100-yards below the site. Waste oil was disposed of in 55-gallon drums and likely shipped out on the supply barges each year.

"With such a large and varied operation, there were no doubt occasional accidental spills of different kinds, but none deliberate, and to my knowledge, none large," Gilliland recalled.

Gilliland moved to Petersburg in June 1966 and, "bought what was left of the Alaska Television Network," that brought television programming to Petersburg. It was located in the Fryer Machine Shop building. Week-old television programs were taped and sent to Petersburg and Wrangell with a week-long delay in both towns.

Following a lawsuit for misuse of television programming brought by TV stations and studios, the company went bankrupt.

Gilliland started Pacific Marine Electonics with partner Jim Stevens and repaired marine electronics for a couple of years. Then he trolled for a while before going to work for Alaska Communications System that was later bought out by RCA Alaska Communications where he worked until he retired in 1997.