The Environmental Division of the Directorate Public Works manages all aspects of environmental regulation compliance, restoration, conservation, and planning.
DPW Environmental provides the installation with compliance support for regulations protecting public health and the environment from activities, equipment, hazardous materials and waste regulated for their impacts to air, soil, and water. Staff tracks new federal regulations, assesses the impact on the Army, acquires permits to allow for construction on the installation, provides the Army's comments to queries from regulators, and keeps the Army informed about new regulatory activity.
The Environmental Division administers an Installation Restoration Program to identify, investigate, and remediate contamination from regulated substances. Contaminant source areas are managed by interagency agreements designed to address the concerns of the EPA, State of Alaska, and the Army. These agreements outline how clean-up processes will be administered at the source areas.
Conservation programs support military readiness by maintaining and managing public lands and resources withdrawn for Army use. This is accomplished by managing natural resources critical to training assets, integrating elements of natural resources management into military training programs, and complying with laws and regulations governing the treatment of cultural resources.
Environmental planning provides decision makers and other stakeholders with the information they need to understand potential environmental impacts of proposed Army actions. One of the basic principles of environmental planning is better decision-making based on detailed analysis about the consequences and trade-offs associated with taking any given course of action.