It's pretty much impossible to miss the remnants of World War Two in Unalaska, Concrete bunkers and rusted out buildings dot the Aleutian landscape and integrate themselves into nearly every neighborhood in this fishing community of about 4,500 people.

Unalaska played a key role in the Second World War.

But when the war ended, the military left quite a bit behind.

Grenades, chemical weapons and other munitions have been known to turn up on the islands hiking trails and beaches.

Bunkers and unexploded munitions get a lot of attention.

But the bigger problem is invisible.

People here live with pollution originating from material the military left behind in the 1940's.

There was a lot of concern about pollution in water systems, in bays and the creeks that they used for subsistence at that time.

Mayor Vince Tutiakoff, Sr., grew up in Unalaska.

He says he's seen the health effects that he believes were caused by military contamination.

There's just all kinds of contaminants that we're dealing with.

PCBs is one of the major ones that cause cancer and other diseases to our people out here over the years.

Tutiakoff is one of many who've been actively asking the feds to clean up his town.

He says soiled testing over the last decade has revealed well over 200 sites that were contaminated.

This area here is Ski Bowl, it's one of those sites and there are another 30 or 40 more sites just in this area within three to five mile radius of the spot here that needs to get cleaned up.

In the 1980s, the Army Corps of Engineers developed a program to clean up places used by the United States' military.

Today, the formerly Used Defense Sites program has thousands of cleanup projects around the country, and Alaska has more than any other state.

We've got project sites pretty much everywhere that the U.S. military has been in possession of land or has been occupying land all over the state.

Jake Sweet works with the corps.

He's in Unalaska to help remove soil that was contaminated by heating oil during the war.

We are doing an excavation to remove contaminated soil.

There used to be a lab and a structure here had an underground storage tank that the army used to hit these buildings that were out here.

And then when they left, unfortunately, they would sometimes leave some fuel in those tanks.

And then over time, the tanks would release fuel into the ground.

The crews bag up the soil and send it to a hazardous waste landfill in Oregon.

The corps finished cleaning up the site in September and installed wells to monitor the groundwater, which meets the state's safety standards.

It was a major step in one of Unalaska's biggest residential neighborhoods.

But that leaves dozens more, just in Unalaska.

We do not have the funds, the community doesn't have the funds.

We didn't create the contamination.

We want to work with the government to make sure it gets cleaned up..

The Army Corps of Engineers is gearing up for the next two Unalaska cleanup projects.

They've contracted with a local environmental firm and expect to begin field work in 2024.

In Unalaska, I'm Theo Greenly.