Alaskan Accessibility

Nov 1, 2024|Project Spotlight|Kaija Wilkinson

Kaija Wilkinson
Nov 1, 2024

Sitka, Alaska; image courtesy of Travel Alaska

Otis team delivers VT solutions for a growing airport serving a small island town.

Nestled among the mountains and lakes of Southeast Alaska, Sitka is a small town steeped in natural beauty and history. Approximately 90 mi from the state capital of Juneau, it is spread over Baranof Island, part of Chichagof Island and others. Russian explorers settled Sitka — derived from a contraction of “People on the Outside of Baranof Island” in the language of the Tlingit Indians who have lived in the area since the turn of the last Ice Age. What was originally called New Archangel was under Russian rule from 1799 until 1867. Vestiges of this heritage remain in the form of an onion-domed Russian Orthodox church and the Russian bishop’s house, one of the few surviving examples of Russian colonial architecture in North America. Open to tourists, the structures are both historic landmarks built in the 1840s.^[1]

Sitka is accessible only by sea and air, which makes the Sitka Rocky Gutierrez Airport (named for a 1980s mayor) all the more critical. The state-owned, public-use airport opened in 1969 and has handled increasingly growing traffic. The Sitka Sound Cruise Terminal opened in 2022, replacing the Old Sitka Dock. The cruise port is described as “a scenic gateway to Alaska’s oldest city.”^[2]

“The internal escalator team had to navigate and plan for critical path items from the very early stages.”
— Otis Alaska GM Sierra Stonich

As visitors flock to the area, Sitka has reached a “tipping point” as residents grapple with the impact of tourism. The town’s summer tourism season was in full swing this past summer, with numbers expected to be close to last year’s record-breaking 585,000 cruise visitors. On a handful of days, the number of visitors exceeded Sitka’s own population of approximately 8,000.^[2]And then there are the travelers who cruise to Alaska and fly home, as well as those who simply fly into and out of Sitka.

That means its little airport was in dire need of an expansion —an expansion that finally took off in fall 2023 thanks to a US$45-million expansion funded, in part, by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act. The work, which includes a two-story terminal addition, brings with it more room, larger restrooms and upgraded vertical transportation (VT). In fact, in August the town welcomed its very first escalator — a nearly US$500,000 Otis unit that arrived via cargo container — as part of the airport work.

Including an Otis HydroFit^TM machine-room-less holeless hydraulic elevator, the VT project was sold and managed by Mike Liebing, who recently retired from Otis as its Anchorage general manager (GM) after nearly 30 years.

Otis Alaska GM Sierra Stonich tells ELEVATOR WORLD the job was introduced to Otis through an invitation to bid from the City and Borough of Sitka, and that “Otis Alaska had a leg up because of the extreme accuracy of its initial project drawings.” Those drawings were overseen by Liebing, a professional engineer whose input was essential to initial project planning. Stonich said:

“The internal escalator team had to navigate and plan for critical path items from the very early stages. Mike explained to me the logistical importance of needing to get materials on-site very early in the process so the escalator could be staged, assembled and then placed into the pit using a crane before the roof of the building was built. Afterward, the escalator was protected from the elements while the rest of the building was constructed.”

Once building construction was complete, Otis crews returned to finish the escalator in July. Work to install the hydraulic elevator that is also part of the project commenced in October. Both units have a rise of 12 ft, with the elevators having 3500-lb capacity and traveling at up to 100 ft/min. The entire VT project is scheduled to be complete this month.

The greatest challenges, Stonich said, included the freight and barge schedules for Alaska since all equipment came from the lower 48 states on barges. That involved quite a bit of intricate planning, she said.

Remarking on what was most rewarding about the project, Liebing observed:

“Customers, general contractors and architects all want to have Otis Alaska on their team because we are the team committed to doing the job correctly and getting it done on time. We are experts at this. We’ve been doing this in our community for a long time.”