“If it’s frozen, keep it frozen; if it’s thawed, keep it thawed.” Marcus Trivette of Brice Inc. gave ENR that rule for building on permafrost, and it explains a detail that sounds backwards at first: his crews put polystyrene insulation inside road and runway sections. Not to keep the surface warm. To keep the ground underneath cold.
The soil is the structure
Permafrost underlies about 80% of Alaska and runs as deep as 2,200 feet, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. The active layer, the part that thaws and refreezes each year, averages between one and a half and six feet. Gravel, Trivette told ENR, “conducts a lot of energy into the soil,” so a conventional section becomes a heat pipe into ground that only works as a foundation while it stays frozen.
Kevin Bjella, an Arctic research civil engineer at the Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, works out of a permafrost tunnel about 40 feet below ground near Fairbanks, built in the 1960s. His summary: “when it comes to permafrost, the bad actor is ice.” Thaw-stable and thaw-unstable ground can sit tens of feet apart, which makes this a site investigation problem before it’s a design problem. Bjella estimates it could be more than a decade before handheld permafrost characterization devices reach the market.
The techniques already in the field
Buildings get elevated so air circulates underneath. Releveling gets done with shims, spacers and sand-filled 55-gallon drums. Thermosiphons, passive heat pipes developed in the 1960s for the Trans-Alaska pipeline, pull heat out of the ground in winter and shut themselves off in summer. Insulation inside the road section is the newer addition.
Brice is running disaster response work at Kwigillingok and a roughly $500 million Corps of Engineers coastal erosion project at Utqiagvik, now under way and targeted to finish in 2033. That job is a rock revetment along about five miles of coast, a protective berm and a raised street. USACE Alaska District’s Leif Hammes says that where erosion moves fast, 10 to 60 feet of land can disappear in a single summer.
The number that sets the scale
Typhoon Halong destroyed Kwigillingok and Kipnuk in October 2025. Alaska officials estimate up to 95% of infrastructure in those communities is damaged beyond repair, with FEMA rebuild estimates near $100 million per village. A 2024 Alaska Native Health Consortium report put statewide need for environmentally threatened villages at at least $4.3 billion.
Federal civil work at that scale normally means a decade of programming and a certified cost estimate, which is how the Corps has handled the Kentucky Lock Addition across three decades. Alaska doesn’t have that runway. The ground is moving faster than the appropriation cycle, and the adaptation happening now is being engineered by contractors on disaster-response schedules rather than programmed by anyone. Most of the detail above is single-sourced to ENR’s reporting and to the Brice and Corps staff quoted in it.