Alaska Seaplanes workers and customers have a new two-person portable toilet to use when nature calls, but they’ll have to wait for it to thaw out first.
The toilet is an improvement over the Porta Potty that has been in place since early January when the company stopped using a septic system management says has had issues for years, which came to a head during a winter freeze.
Seaplanes General manager Carl Ramseth recalls that the problems with the terminal’s public bathroom facility started in the fall of 2018, almost immediately after it was installed during a drainage improvement and runway resurfacing project that was finished in 2018. He said the system was officially signed off on and in use by late June of that year.
“We started having problems with things getting clogged and backed up. We had plumbers out there with cameras… they found some extra gaskets that had been left inside that were causing the clogs,” he said.
But he said it also seemed like the new 3,000 gallon tank was filling up too fast. Ramseth said the company put in a new toilet that had a lower gallon-per-flush flow rate, but the tank still seemed to fill up quickly and, he said, it happened more frequently when there were periods of heavy rain, implying that ground water was infiltrating the holding tank.
The company settled into a routine of getting it pumped twice a week in the summer and about once a week in the winter. Ramseth said that cost about $1,500 a pump at first, but is up to about $2,300 a pump now.
Everything came to a head during the cold snap in December.
“You wouldn’t think — I mean there wasn’t any groundwater, surface water. It was too cold. But after Christmas and before New Years, I think we ended up doing three pumps in December,” he said.
The company did another on Jan. 7 after its monitor showed that the tank was full again.
“At that point, we decided that we weren’t going to pump it anymore, and we got a Porta Potty out there,” Ramseth said.
But a portable toilet comes with its own set of problems. “We had it in one of our Conex out there to help keep it warmer,” Ramseth said.
Now, Seaplanes has upgraded that solo Porta-Potty to a dual modular unit. But on Wednesday morning when a station manager visited town for part of the day to check on the status of things, that one was completely frozen.
Ramseth said the manager put some larger heaters in the unit and now they’ve asked Community Waste Solutions to come out and pump the tank on the septic connected to the bathroom in the terminal building. The terms of the land lease with the state require that the bathroom be open to the general public.
In the meantime, Ramseth said they’ve told staff they can leave to go to the restroom, but that’s an inconvenience and there are none nearby. He said there is a portable handwashing station on site that the company has been renting from Ketchikan.
Ramseth said Seaplanes is looking for a more permanent solution. He said he’s reached out to a few engineers, including one that designed the company’s above-ground septic system in Kake. He’s hoping the company will be able to get a design for a better-functioning system that the state will approve. He said he’s had positive conversations with a contractor who installs septic and drain field systems and is familiar with the Haines airport.
And in the meantime, company officials are asking residents to weigh-in with the state. Ramseth said he has been communicating with the department of transportation but has not gotten a lot of response.
“I want to maintain a good working relationship with them, but we feel like the original system should not have been installed because it hasn’t worked,” Ramseth said. “We need to find a better long-term solution, and as soon as possible.”
He’s hoping that if more people comment the project will become more of a priority for the state.
To that end, he asked the people to weigh-in on the importance of upgrading the Haines’ station’s septic system as the state seeks comments on its Long Range Transportation Plan which is currently out for public comment. That website can be found at https://publicinput.com/c03646.