Biohazard Cleanup Near North Wainwright Wainwright, AK

Wainwright (Iñupiaq: Ulġuniq), also known as Ulguniq or Kuuk, is a city in North Slope Borough on the Chukchi Sea, about 72 miles southwest of Utqiaġvik.

At the 2020 census Wainwright had 628 residents, up from 556 in 2010, living in 156 households, making it the third-largest city in North Slope Borough.

The community was named for Wainwright Lagoon, which was named after Lieutenant John Wainwright, an officer under Captain F. W. Beechey, who were the first non-native people to travel to the lagoon in 1826.

The area has long been inhabited by the Iñupiat, who called the region Ulġuniq and hunted bowhead whales and fished for subsistence.

The present village was established in 1904, when the Alaska Native Service built a school there, and Wainwright incorporated as a city on December 31, 1962.

Wainwright first appeared on the 1890 census as the unincorporated area of 'Wainwright Inlet,' including the Native settlement Kugmiut and camps on the Kug River.

On August 18, 1778, Captain James Cook turned south off Wainwright after finding his path north through the Northwest Passage blocked by ice.

During the Cold War a Distant Early Warning Line station was built near Wainwright in 1953; it operated as a staffed facility until 1989, was converted to an unstaffed radar station in 1994, and closed in 2008.

The Olgoonik Corporation, Wainwright's Alaska Native village corporation, was established in 1973 under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

Wainwright has a dry-winter Arctic climate, with temperatures ranging from minus 56 to 84 degrees Fahrenheit, and the Chukchi Sea is unfrozen from early July to late September.