Utqiagvik Lifting Work, From Seawall Rock to Piling Foundations

The Barrow Coastal Erosion Project

In May 2024 the Army Corps of Engineers awarded Anchorage-based Brice Civil Constructors the first construction contract, worth about $60 million, for a project meant to protect roughly five miles of coast. The full plan calls for rock revetments, an armored berm and raising and armoring Stevenson Street, with further segments to be awarded over several years and completion targeted around 2031. Congress put $364.3 million into it through the 2022 Disaster Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act, and the borough pays the 10 percent local share.

Revetment work means placing heavy armor stone one piece at a time, often with long-reach excavators and cranes working near surf. Knowing the exact weight of each stone and the crane's capacity at that radius is the whole game. The rigging and signaling discipline is the same one taught in certification prep.

Building on permafrost

Researchers presenting at the European Geosciences Union in 2024 found permafrost still thermally stable under elevated structures in Utqiagvik, but University of Alaska Fairbanks measurements reported by the Alaska Beacon show soils down to about 20 meters warming by as much as 4°C per decade. Buildings here are typically raised on pilings to keep heat out of the ground.

For a crane crew, that means pile handling, careful set-up on gravel pads that sit over ice-rich soil, and attention to how ground conditions change between a frozen April and a thawed August. Stability, ground bearing and cribbing are core topics on the mobile operator exam for good reason.

How the seawall contract is structured

The Corps set up the coastal work as a single-award task order contract reserved for 8(a) small businesses, with segments issued over several years instead of one large award. That pattern means several construction seasons of rock placement, berm building and road raising rather than one big push. Operators and ground crew who are certified and available locally can be useful to every segment, not just the first.

Open-water and summer months are when most marine-side placement happens. Winter work tends to shift to stockpiling, hauling and staging, which still involves loaders, cranes and rigging, often in darkness and deep cold.

Borough capital priorities

The city's 2024 capital priority survey drew from the borough's six-year plan and listed water and sewer, utilidor and pump station upgrades, East Barrow lot roads and a new Iḷisaġvik College campus. The borough has also designed a pilot to move about 27 homes onto an above-ground water and sewer system, a break from the buried utilidors used since the mid-1980s. Utility modules, tanks and pipe racks are routine lifts for boom trucks and mobile cranes.