As soon as the last flakes of winter have melted away, it's time for base personnel to prepare for the next season by doing everything from patching potholes and repairing snow damaged roadways to servicing equipment to ensure it is online prior to the next winter.

"As soon as the winter ends, we begin to make any necessary building repairs caused by weather damage as well as making sure building heating systems are prepared to keep the buildings from freezing when the weather turns cold again," said Scott Anderson, the chief of infrastructure with the 3rd Civil Engineering Squadron.

"Right now, we're at the end of the summer rebuild program on our transportation and all our deicer trucks, so we'll be pulling those out here in about another week or so," said Bob Girous, the maintenance operations officer for the 3rd Equipment Maintenance Squadron. "It's then that we will start to bring civilians on to start servicing the trucks with anti-icing and deicing fluid."

It takes a lot of manpower to move the average of 70 inches of snow that fall on the base yearly, Girous said. More than 120 civilians work at the base seasonally for the sole purpose of keeping roads, buildings and operational areas free of snow and deicing aircraft.

Keeping aircraft and the runways free of ice and snow is essential to ensuring mission effectiveness.

"If we can't keep the runways open, planes aren't going to fly," Girous said.

Safety is the bottom line of all snow removal operations, which is a challenge to achieve in the environment the personnel have to work in.

"We ask a lot of our people. We put them out there in vehicles in the worst possible conditions and we ask them to operate safely and they do it fairly well," Anderson said. "Plows are traveling at 40 mph, which they have to do to be able to dig through the snow. When it's blowing, snowing and visibility is nil, we have to make sure that safety is paramount."

The extreme standards personnel operate under and the extended winters set the base apart from other installations.

"We deice up to 2,000 aircraft in a six month window," said Wes Menzer, the equipment flight chief. "We probably do as much as the rest of the Air Force combined."

As a result, Elmendorf is a prime testing ground.

"Most of the testing for aircraft deicing and equipment in the Air Force is done at Elmendorf," Girous said. "We have a six month window and because we have a civilian force that will come in, we have the continuity there that few other bases have."

The extended winters and an airfield comparable to Anchorage's Ted Stevens International Airport have helped personnel to gain a wealth of experience.

"The airfield alone is roughly 3.3 million square yards of asphalt, but we're also talking runways, parking lots, ramps and then we have roughly 53 miles of road," Anderson said.

It takes a fleet of about 80 pieces of equipment ranging from snowplows to brooms, blowers, dump trucks, front-end loaders and graters to keep it all in operation, Anderson added.

"The snow removal team here has won numerous awards for being the best," Anderson said. "Air Force bases around the world have been compared and we've won in a number of categories as far as chemical use, number of accidents and amount of snowfall."

Girous said that what sets Elmendorf a part from other installations is, "six months of practice."

"It's a big team effort. There are a lot of folks involved," Anderson added. "Be prepared, you have to always be thinking about what may be coming next weather wise and how to best prepare for it."

Reach the reporter at news@alaskastar.com.

This article published in The Alaska Star on Thursday, September 29, 2005.