Cold Bay Airport project to wrap up July 31

A rehabilitation project at the Cold Bay Airport, including a new taxiway and apron to the Aleutians East Borough’s Terminal Building, is slated for completion July 31, the borough’s online newsletter, “In the Loop,” reports.

As of June 30, the project was 60 percent done and workers with Knik Construction were concentrating on the main runway. Paving of 6,100 feet of the 10,180-foot runway on the east side and all of it on the west side had been completed, noted  newsletter editor Laura Tanis.

Kim Steed, project engineer with R&M Consulting, said the crews accelerated part of their schedule on the main runway about three weeks ago after learning that Northern Air Cargo needed to land there to haul out a shipment from Peter Pan Seafoods, which maintains a year-round processing plant at nearby King Cove.

Northern Air Cargo needed a minimum of 6,000 feet of runway to get the job done.

R&M Consulting worked with the contractor, and over three days paved enough to extend the southern half of the runway to 6,000 feet, Steed said. “Then we installed lights and so forth, so they could land.”

Editor Tanis said one of the most surprising occurrences during the project was finding a bible and a prayer book from 1941 buried beneath the asphalt.

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Steed said when contractors were milling close to the area where the new taxiway will intersect with Taxiway Delta he noticed that the milled asphalt looked odd, so he brushed some of the dirt out of the way, started pulling on the paper that was there, and out came a section of the bible. Another one was found at another location close by.

“So I guess back in 1941, when they put the original asphalt down, that’s what they did. They’d place a bible in it for good luck,” he told Tanis.

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