The Air Force has removed two sites from a list of locations around the eastern Interior where the agency has proposed to build radar training facilities.
The radar sites are intended to help train F-35 pilots from Eielson Air Force Base to detect and locate signals similar to those emitted by enemy surface-to-air missile facilities that the pilots might encounter in combat.
The Air Force says it needs the radar sites to upgrade pilot training in and around the Joint Pacific Alaska Range Complex, or JPARC. That’s a series of training ranges around Alaska that provide some 77-thousand square miles of airspace.
Eielson 354th Range Squadron Commander Lt. Col. Jay Doerfler said last year that the radar sites would enable U.S. pilots to get training needed to prevail in 21st century conflicts.
“Our own capabilities, as well as our adversaries’ capabilities, are getting better every day,” Doerfler said. “And in order to train to accommodate those changes, we just need to modernize what we do here out in the JPARC and in Alaska.”
But the Air Force decided not to build two of the nine originally proposed sites in response to opposition by area residents and others. According to the Final Environmental Assessment the agency issued last month, those sites are located near Quartz Lake, north of Delta Junction, and Dry Creek, near the Gerstle River south of Delta.
Mindy Eggleston is one of those residents. And she was glad the agency agreed to their requests.
“It was such a relief to hear the final judgment of the originally proposed Dry Creek site being vacated,” she said.
Eggleston and her husband, Gene, own a 5-acre homesite near Dry Creek that they homesteaded in 1973. They’ve since moved closer to Delta, but they and many others still frequently go out to the area to hike, ride four-wheelers, pick berries and hunt.
Eggleston said she and others also wanted the site to remain undeveloped to protect caribou that live and migrate around the nearby Macomb Plateau.
“It was wonderful that our public and agency comments were heard and the right decision was made,” she said. “A big thanks goes out to everybody who took time to comment on saving our precious Macomb Plateau.”
The seven remaining sites where radar facilities will be built include one on Air Force land and another on Fairbanks North Star Borough property. Two others will be developed on state land, and the remaining three on Army-administered lands.
An Eielson spokesperson said in an email that construction on some of those sites will get underway this summer. Others will be built over the next few years.
