An Eighty-Million-Dollar Dock Caught Fire With No Working Hydrants

A fire broke out at about 11 a.m. on Monday, September 14 at the dock of the Chugach Glacier Gateway Cruise Terminal in Whittier, Alaska. It started aboard the Klondike Express, a 137-foot high-speed catamaran operated by Phillips Cruises & Tours that was tied up alongside, and spread from the vessel to the structure. There were no passengers aboard, the U.S. Coast Guard said, and no injuries were reported. The Klondike Express sustained significant damage, taking one of the region’s best-known day-tour boats out of service with a few weeks of the season still to run.

The detail that has drawn attention since is not the fire itself but the response to it. Anchorage Fire Department officials said the roughly $80 million terminal dock had no working hydrants when the blaze started, forcing crews to fight it without the water supply a newly built marine facility would normally be expected to provide. The Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel, the single road link into Whittier and one of the longest highway tunnels in North America, was closed for several hours so emergency vehicles could get through, and reopened at around 2 p.m.

Norwegian Cruise Line’s Norwegian Jade was at the terminal that morning and moved off the dock as the fire took hold. The ship was undamaged and no guests were hurt. Norwegian shifted the day’s embarkation to an alternative terminal in Whittier, and passengers joined the sailing from there with delays but without the cruise being cancelled. For a port that handles a large share of Alaska’s late-season cruise turnarounds, losing the primary berth on a changeover day – when one full ship’s complement disembarks and another embarks within hours – is close to a worst case.

Whittier is a town of a few hundred residents with an outsized role in Alaska cruising, and the Chugach Glacier Gateway terminal was built specifically to modernise a berth long considered inadequate for the traffic passing across it. The hydrant question now sits at the centre of whatever comes next, both operationally for the sailings still scheduled in a season that runs only a few more weeks, and institutionally for the review that tends to follow a brand-new public facility burning with no water available on the pier. Neither the cause of the original shipboard fire nor the reason the hydrants were inoperative has yet been established.

Sources: Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Public Media