The U.S. Air Force is proposing a clean-up of a former military installation at Nikolski.

The Air Force has come up with recommendations for five sites at the radio relay station. The dam and water supply house contain no contaminants, so the Air Force is not proposing any action at those two sites. But at the landfill, the Air Force does want to put in place boundary markers to keep people from entering the area, since it does contain both petroleum and asbestos. The most serious work that the Air Force is recommending is the excavations of the petroleum, oil, and lubricants tank farm.

Steve Hunt is the remedial project manager for the Air Force, and he says that an intense clean-up is necessary at the tank farm because it lies on property that’s valuable to the community of Nikolski.

“It’s an excellent site. They’re interested in expanding their village there, and perhaps establishing residences on the site,” says Hunt. “They’ve requested in the past that we clean that up to levels that would support residential use in the future, so that’s what we’re going to do.”

The radio relay station was built in 1958, as one of Alaska’s distant early warning stations. It remained in operation through 1977, and then most of the buildings there were demolished in 1980. The site is now owned by the Aleut Corporation, and the Air Force has already done some previous remedial work there.

Right now, it’s unclear how much the restoration is going to cost. But Hunt says that it won’t be cheap.

“It’s expensive to do remediation in Alaska compared to the Lower 48, as you can imagine,” says Hunt. “I don’t have off the top of my head what the figures are. But on average, if we spent $500,000 to clean up a site in Phoenix, Arizona, in Alaska, the cost of cleaning up the site would probably be three times that amount of money.”

Hunt says that the earliest the remediation could happen would be summer 2013. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army has also been cleaning up their former site at Fort Glenn, on the northwest part of Umnak Island.

The Air Force will be holding meeting on their proposal this spring, and it will be accepting public comment through March 17.