ARCAP — Alaska Railbelt Critical Assets Project

Alaska’s Railbelt region is one of the most logistically isolated population corridors in the United States — a linear chain of communities, utilities, and transportation infrastructure connecting Fairbanks in the interior to the Kenai Peninsula in the south. The region’s dependence on a small number of critical nodes makes it acutely vulnerable to disruption: if key infrastructure fails, there are few alternative pathways for food, fuel, and essential goods.

ARCAP investigates the resilience of this system, with particular focus on the Port of Alaska in Anchorage. As the primary entry point for roughly 90% of the goods consumed in the state, the port represents a structural single point of failure — a vulnerability that is well understood in principle but poorly characterized in terms of its cascading effects, recovery timelines, and intervention options.

The project combines infrastructure analysis, expert elicitation with regional stakeholders, and tabletop exercises to map how disruptions at the port and across the Railbelt system would propagate through supply chains and community services. This approach draws on methods developed in critical infrastructure protection, resilience engineering, and community engagement to produce actionable findings for emergency managers, infrastructure operators, and state and federal planners.

The work is supported by the ADAC-ARCTIC Center of Excellence, a Department of Homeland Security-funded center focused on Arctic and subarctic infrastructure security, and is conducted in partnership with Idaho National Laboratory and the University of Alaska Anchorage.