By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
Once a torrent, the water now trickles from the Starrigavan artesian well, but the Forest Service says repairs are planned and the water remains potable.
The water from the natural well is regularly tested for a variety of dangerous contaminants, Sitka District Ranger Perry Edwards told the Sentinel Tuesday.
“Absolutely, we regularly test that water monthly to make sure that there is no coliform sort of thing. And then we have other schedules we do on a longer basis for lead and copper, arsenic and all those things. And if there was any question if it was safe to drink, we would shut it down immediately,” Edwards said.
Water trickles from the artesian well at the Starrigavan Campground this morning. (Sentinel Photo)
While the water remains safe to drink, Edwards said the flow is down to about one third of a gallon per minute – just enough to fill a typical hiking water bottle in that time. In contrast, when the well opened in 1993, water poured forth at a gallon per second.
“It’s a bladder of water under tremendous pressure underground, and when they punctured the case in 1993 we got 60 gallons a minute at high tide,” Edwards said. “It feeds the campground, the host cabin. And anything left over – which is most of it – comes out of the spigot here (at the campground).”
An artesian well operates on underground water pressure that forces water up through the ground, the U.S. Geological Survey states. The name is derived from wells in the ancient Roman city of Artesium - modern Artois, France.
Artesian water is really not different from other groundwater, except for the fact that it flows to the land surface because pressure in the rocks underground force it to the surface, the U.S. Geological Survey website reads.
While online rumors have swirled around the Starrigavan well, Edwards said neither chlorine nor fluoride is added to the water. Also, he said, no inhibitor is placed on the well to reduce flow.
“Somebody said, ‘Well, the city put in a limiter to slow the water down.’” Edwards said. In fact, he added, “The city has absolutely nothing to do with the Starrigavan artesian well.”
The reason for the dramatically reduced flow rate is more mundane.
“The flow rate of the Starrigavan artesian well has been slowed to 1/3 gallon per minute by accumulated bacteria and inorganic matter inside the well casing,” USFS public affairs officer Paul Robbins wrote in an email. “This is down from 8 gallons per minute it was producing after the USDA Forest Service hired a company to clean it in 2015. The Sitka Ranger District is currently working with an Alaskan well company to develop solutions that will increase the flow rate to a minimum of 9 gallons per minute.”
In the immediate future, Edwards said, the plan is to clean the existing well pipe and remove any clog.
“We’re basically going to Roto Root out, or chimney sweep out all that biological growth and basically suck it out,” Edwards said. “The intent is to go down to the whole well casing, clean that up and suck it out. If that doesn’t work, we may have to try to drill a new well and casing to improve that.
“We did get Great American Outdoors Act funding to get the testing we have done thus far,” he added.
He noted that the time frame for repairs is uncertain.
“We’re preparing to put together a contract but we’ve got a lot of other contracts that we’re doing… It could be some time later this summer, it might not be until fall or winter,” he said.
On April 26, the Forest Service contracted a private company to send a camera down the well to inspect for damage. The video from the pipe is public on YouTube on the Wheton Water Well Incorporated channel. The well was briefly shut during that exploration period.
Edwards described this as an “endoscopy for our artesian well. We were happy that it didn’t appear that the pipe had rusted or been crushed.”
The ranger reaffirmed the safety of the water, noting that any concerns would lead to a shutdown.
“I would immediately shut it down. We would do any retesting and we would not open it until we were completely, one hundred percent sure it was safe for public consumption,” he said.
Other Projects
Along with the plan to restore the artesian well, a number of other projects are underway in the Sitka Ranger District this summer, Edwards said.
But one major project, restoring the landslide-damaged headwaters of the Starrigavan River, has been placed on hold because of supply problems created by the pandemic.
“We put out a contract for bids to do the stream restoration, and came back from contractors that they could not get materials for culverts and bridges, because of COVID and supply chain issues. So we are now putting that off until next season because we are rapidly going to run out of the fish timing window,” Edwards said.
He said the project remains “shovel-ready” for next year.
The ranger said personnel are already stretched thin with the backload of projects needing attention in the ranger district. One reason, he said, is funding made available created by the Great American Outdoors Act that President Trump signed into law last August.
Hailed by the nonprofit Outdoor Recreation Roundtable as “the single greatest piece of conservation and outdoor recreation legislation before Congress in decades,” the act will deposit a potential $9.5 billion over the next five years to correct the deferred maintenance backlog on lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management and other federal public land management agencies.
A side effect of the GAOA on the Sitka Ranger District, Edwards said, is an increase in workload.
“One of the problems we have, we got all these golden anvils falling from the sky, he said, “We only have so many people to work on those projects.”
A spike in workload leads to employee burnout, he added.
“Golden anvils from the sky, millions of dollars available but those golden anvils can quickly become golden anchors around your neck when you’re trying to swim to shore. You just burn people out and that doesn’t help,” he said.
Another project in the ranger district is the rerouting of the Gavan Hill trail, also slated for 2022, though the land transfer from the Alaska Mental Health Trust to the USFS is almost finished.
“It (the transfer) should be done any day now – it was supposed to be done by the middle of May,” Edwards said. “Then they said late May, so I think we’re in the final stages.”
In the coming months, Edwards said, the Forest Service plans to work on the Kanga Bay cabin, the Shelikof trail, the Mt. Edgecumbe trail, and the Chichagof Island road networks damaged by storms in fall 2020.
“We have still not had a chance to get out there (on the False Island road system),” he said. “This has been a really slow year for snowmelt. We tried to get back there a while back, we had three feet of snow at False Island about two miles up the road.”
He expressed concern that streams could reroute themselves on top of the road, as happened in the Starrigavan Valley following the 2014 landslide.
“We’re going to be trying to get emergency funding ... to try to first just start working our way down the road. I suspect that there will be a lot of opportunities to fix stuff this summer. And part of this is that if you don’t fix it, it will probably get worse and impact areas downstream, or it could be like Starrigavan and divert from a stream to a roadbed. I’ve seen in the past, here in Sitka and in other places I’ve worked, where I see one culvert clog and a ditch opens up so that you could drive a Volkswagen Bug through.”
The exceptionally harsh weather of the 2020-21 fall and winter was the cause of many problems, Edwards said.
“Those fall and winter storms...were some of the biggest that we’ve ever seen, and it wasn’t just Sitka, it was the whole northern half of the Tongass,” he said.
For now, Edwards said, it will be vital to prioritize workload.
“I feel like it’s really important – when we have limited personnel and these different projects – to try to prioritize those, so everyone doesn’t feel like we have to do everything,” he said.
