Borough faces costly fix at Heritage Harbor

Late last month, the borough discovered an oversight in the construction of Heritage Harbor — its steel pilings and piers do not have corrosion-preventing anodes on them.

These pieces of oxidizing metal protect pilings from underwater degradation. Without them, the supports underneath the Heritage floats have begun to corrode. The borough plans to work quickly to install nearly $1 million worth of anodes at the harbor to prevent further wear.

Near the end of March, the Port and Harbors Department sent a diver to check the anodes at Heritage Harbor and confirm that they were functioning properly. When the diver couldn’t locate any, Port Director Steve Miller checked the harbor’s design plans and discovered that anodes had never been included in the project to begin with.

“I don’t know if somebody didn’t catch it,” Miller told the port commission at its meeting April 6. “I’m not 100% sure why they weren’t included.” He was not the harbormaster when Heritage was designed and constructed in the years leading up to its completion in 2009.

On March 30, he got a cost estimate back from PND Engineers outlining how much it will cost to add anodes after the fact. “When I got the number is when I really got sick,” he said. The total recommended budget is $988,403 — and that number could increase if Miller wants divers to test the integrity of the pilings while anode installation is being done.

Anodes are metal bars about four feet long that range from 250 to 400 pounds. According to current borough plans, the harbor will need 486 of them in a variety of sizes to protect all the pilings.

Miller plans to take action on the project immediately. It has already been bumped to the top of his department’s priority list and will be added into the borough budget July 1. Hopefully, anodes will be installed within the year.

“I don’t think it’s one that we should sit back on,” he said. In the past, many of the department’s pricier projects have been funded through grants, but grant money isn’t often available for maintenance. “It could take one to five years to even get qualified for a grant,” he added. “My feeling is that it’s too important not to address. We’re already battling rotten infrastructure everywhere, and for this to be part of our rotten infrastructure is a travesty.”

He plans to request that the assembly approve use of borough funds for the project, rather than grants or bonds.

The water in Heritage Harbor is a mix of salt and freshwater that interacts with the steel pilings and other supports to create rust, which can corrode metal. Anodes provide these pilings with “cathodic protection.” Since they are more easily corroded than the pilings, they act as a “sacrificial metal,” taking on damage so the structural integrity of the steel is preserved.

Attaching anodes to pilings — and even to the bottoms of boats — is the industry standard.

The borough doesn’t have any reason to be concerned about the structural integrity of the docks, but if it wants the harbor to last decades into the future, the corrosion can’t be allowed to persist, Miller said. “There’s a lot of meat there, but it’s not something we can continue to let happen,” he said of the pilings. “When you hit those spots with your hand, it just looked like glitter. Glitter bombs in the water.”

Commissioner John Yeager was shocked that anodes were not included in the initial plan and questioned how such an oversight could have occurred. “We had a design that was seen by the engineers, was seen by project managers, was seen by our harbormaster at the time, which was not (Miller), and we still are looking at a million dollars to fix something that is pretty common practice,” he said. “I’m speechless.”

Miller is unsure why anodes were not part of the project design and doubts the borough’s ability to get satisfactory answers to the question at this point. He has a few guesses, but they’re just that – guesses.

“The only way I could probably explain it is that Wrangell doesn’t have a dime into Heritage,” he said. It’s possible that designers or overseers took a more casual approach to the project since the federal government was footing the bill. It also could have been a conscious decision due to lack of funding — galvanized steel pilings without anodes are supposed to last for 30 years on their own. “Maybe it was discussed, but they didn’t have the money,” Miller conjectured.

Regardless, he’s glad he found out about the issue so soon. “I think we’re catching it probably at the best time to go ahead and protect these for another 30 years.”