You really don't get a sense of how huge it is until you're down here.

Yeah!

And it's small.

We start in the port's office building on the main terminal next to where the port's main users, Matson and Tote conduct their business.

let me kind of walk you through.

Yeah, please do.

As port director Steve Ribuffo explains, those companies can't pause operations while the port is under construction.

and we can't just ask the people that are coming here now to go find some place else to go and come back when we're done, because, well, number one, there is no place else for them to go.

The challenge was how do we keep enough of the old open while we're building the new.

Step one was to move the port's petroleum and cement terminal, and in May, the first ship started to dock there.

Now that's opening up room to start working on the first new dock.

These new docks will be wider and sturdier, with larger cranes closer to industry standards.

Ribuffo says that's in part because the current docks aren't big enough for many of Madsen's ships.

The booms on these only go out so far.

They're far enough to cover the width of this vessel.

But anything bigger, even in their inventory when it comes here, they either have to load it so that they don't have to reach all the way to the other end.

Or if they do, they've got to pull it away from the dock, turn it around, come back in.

Yeah.

Oh, it won't.

Every time you move something that big as close to something this old, there's always risk.

And that's the other main reason for the rebuild.

The port is old.

And as U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg noted in a recent visit.

It's deteriorating.

The infrastructure that this port depends on is very much in urgent need of update.

The original terminals were constructed before many of us were born after the better part of a century as we've seen first hand in today's visit.

The very foundations are beginning to corrode and come apart.

Buttigieg noted a nearly $70 million grant the port received from his department in 2022.

Overall, the modernization project boasts a price tag approaching $2 billion.

row pile.

It's a permitting thing.

It's a cost thing.

But despite the cost, Ribuffo says, the port sees relatively little traffic, at least compared to the lower 48. we get autilization rate on the on the dock we have now of less than 40 %.

which means 60% of the time we're looking out the window and there's nothing going on down here because you don't need any more than that to support the population.

The number seems low, and with Alaska's population growth slowing or even reversing, Ribuffo says port activity isn't likely to increase any time soon.

The upgrades, though, aren't to expand but to stay viable.

We've got to upgrade what we hav because this is not state of the industry.

It is getting harder and harder every year to find parts to fix these.

An investment now to carry Alaska into the future for years to come.

In Anchorage, I'm Lori Townsend.