Report from KTUU News (By Joe Allgood)
April 25, 2025 — After over 60 years of existence, the Don Young Port of Alaska is already in the process of the largest change since its inception.
As part of the Port of Alaska Modernization Program, a contract for over $800 million in work was awarded by the municipality of Anchorage for a new terminal, meaning designs over a decade in the making will begin to take shape.
Photo above: Rendering of the new replacement cargo terminals.
“This is probably the biggest infrastructure project that the state of Alaska has ever seen since maybe the Trans-Alaska pipeline,” said Port Director Steve Ribuffo. “It is that size in significance not only because of the cost, because of the magnitude of change in one place that’s going to happen over a decade.
“Nothing happens fast.”
The main impetus for the project is corrosion and age, prompting safety concerns.
“We were pretty old, and while it served us well, these are modern times, and the corrosion is something that needed to be dealt with,” Ribuffo said.
The port officially opened in 1961, only three years before the 1964 Good Friday earthquake. Since the earthquake did not damage the port as it did ports in Whittier, Seward, and Valdez, cargo traffic was redirected to Anchorage.
If another ’64-sized earthquake were to hit southcentral, Ribuffo is not so sure the port would survive.
“The condition of the facility is in a place where if we continue to do nothing, all it’s going to take is one more big earthquake to drop the entire thing in the water,” he said.
So now, the modernization project is replacing “everything that is in the water,” according to Ribuffo.
Among those replacements is an entirely new Terminal 1, including new cranes nearly three times the size. The current cranes have a width of 38 feet; the new ones will be 100 feet wide.
“They can’t fit on this dock because the dock’s only 69 feet wide,” Ribuffo said. “So you couldn’t put those cranes on this dock even if you wanted to.”
That means expanding the dock while still maintaining regular commerce.
“The challenge has to be that we have to build the new infrastructure and leave enough of the old infrastructure there,” Ribuffo said. “So commerce can continue while we’re building the new stuff.”
Ribuffo says the port has three missions: to conduct commerce, military operations, and disaster response.
In addition to those, the port also receives the occasional cruise ship, only about 10 to 12 a year, Ribuffo said. While there aren’t any expectations to rival Juneau or Ketchikan, they are keeping that in mind while updating the structure.
“That’s a business case that the cruise lines have to make for themselves,” Ribuffo said. “But we will certainly be there to support them if more want to come to Anchorage.”
Ribuffo said there are a number of different challenges and considerations for the project, from the short construction season to rapidly changing tides, as well as preparing for possible rising tides due to global climate change, and environmental factors like the endangered Cook Inlet beluga whale.
“You know, there might be another port or two out there that might have to deal with a couple of those, but we have it all, and we have it all every day and have to figure out how to make a success out of having all those challenges,” Ribuffo said.
