A tiny remote Alaskan village renewed its pleas Thursday for lawmakers to pressure the Department of Interior to approve a one-lane road through a federally protected wilderness to spare its inhabitants the dangers of flying in the area.
King Cove is in the Aleutian Islands between two massive volcanic mountains on the edge of a bay off the Pacific Ocean. There are no roads connecting King Cove to any other Alaskan city, and the nearest medical facilities are in Anchorage, about 625 miles northeast.
That means King Cove residents with medical emergencies must fly to Cold Bay, Alaska, and then to Anchorage for treatment. Flights can be delayed hours or even days by bad weather. And that can be nerve-wracking in a place where the airport is shut down due to bad weather 100 days per year.
The lone medical clinic in town keeps a cache of anti-anxiety pills on hand for people when they travel, and 70 percent of the town has some sort of anxiety issue brought on by flying, according to Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.
Della Trumble, a King Cove resident and spokeswoman for the King Cove Corp., says when residents need to fly they go to the clinic and visit a sort of vending machine that distributes Valium. They get two pills: one for the flight out and one for the flight in.
“I’ve flown with people that scream, that cry, that cuss the whole way,” Trumble said at a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing Thursday. “It’s not a good experience to have to do, but it’s the reality of what we have to do to get between these communities.”
The solution, according to Murkowski, is simple: A one-lane, 11-mile, non-commercial, gravel road between King Cove and Cold Bay, which has the second-largest runway in the state and where the weather is markedly better.
However, that road would have to go through the Izembeck National Wildlife Refuge, including a portion of federally designated wilderness. And, despite decades of campaigning and permission to build the road from Congress and President Obama, the Department of Interior is blocking the project.
In 2013, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell announced that the road would harm the birds and animals in the refuge. She rejected a land-swap deal that would have sent 61,000 acres of state and native lands to the federal government in exchange for 207 acres of the refuge be made available for the road.
Murkowski said it was a huge concession by state and native people who see the road as vital to the health and safety of King Cove’s 1,000 residents. Since the rejection was handed down, 42 Medevac trips were necessary and many of those trips required waiting hours for weather to clear up, Murkowski said.
“The decision Interior has made is cynical, is callous and it devastated the people of King Cove who finally believed help is on the way,” she said.
Alaska Lt. Gov. Byron Mallott made it clear that the state wants the road to be built.
By rejecting the land swap and the construction of the road through the refuge, Interior has essentially decided to prioritize the hypothetical harm to birds and animals over the very real harm to the residents of King Cove, Mallott said.
The federal government must remember that humans live in these areas, he added.
“We reduce or we take away the human face of a place,” he said about making public policy. “In this nation, in order to preserve the beauty of our land, which we in Alaska, we who live there, which we know intimately, wish to preserve as well, our lives … are marginalized.”
However, environmentalists point out that the road could end up being abused.
Nicole Whittington-Evans, the Alaska regional director for the Wilderness Society, said others parts of Alaska have had similar arrangements that ended up being abused for other purposes and wild areas have been harmed.
The road would cut through wetlands that are home to rare birds and could end up destroying their natural habitat, Whittington-Evans said.
It “would be incompatible with and extremely damaging to the refuge,” she said.
