ALASKA'S NEWSPAPER

| Updated: 12:01 AM

Home | Alaska Newsreader | Obituaries | Archives

TV Listings | Movies | Music | Restaurants | Submit Event

Petty Officer 1st Class Sara Francis / AP Photo

The Coast Guard Cutter Healy breaks ice around the Russian-flagged tanker Renda 250 miles south of Nome Jan. 6, 2012. The Healy is the Coast Guard's only currently operating polar icebreaker. The vessels are transiting through ice up to five-feet thick in this area. The 370-foot tanker Renda will have to go through more than 300 miles of sea ice to get to Nome, a city of about 3,500 people on the western Alaska coastline that did not get its last pre-winter fuel delivery because of a massive storm. If the delivery of diesel fuel and unleaded gasoline is not made, the city likely will run short of fuel supplies before another barge delivery can be made in spring. (AP Photo/US Coast Guard - Petty Officer 1st Class Sara Francis)

Alaska Newsreader

ADN finds the news from all over Alaska and about Alaska from around the nation so you don't have to. Updated several times a day. (Some links may require registration.)

MORE ABOUT THE NEWSREADER

SEND LINKS AND SUGGESTIONS

E-MAIL NEWSLETTER | RSS FEED

Tanker mission to Nome: Economic or humanitarian motives first?

Published: January 18th, 2012 12:23 PM
Last Modified: January 23rd, 2012 06:48 PM

Most of the international media coverage of the voyage to Nome of the Russian fuel tanker and Coast Guard icebreaker cast it as a humanitarian effort intended to keep fuel-short residents from shivering in the cold. But non-emergency economic motives of the mission may have been more compelling to the city of Nome and the state of Alaska, says Alaska Dispatch.

Story tools

Font size : A | A | A

tool goes here

As justification for the saga was compressed into sound bites, one important detail was lost: people were not in immediate, if any, jeopardy; enough fuel was on hand to keep homes heated.

Also unmentioned was the need to keep up a construction timeline for shuttering a nearby gold-mining operation -- work that required 150,000 gallons of the dwindling fuel supplies. ...

At its core, the extraordinary mission was a business decision, not one of humanitarian relief -- which is not to say one comes without the other. "I think they are intertwined," said Jason Evans, a chief proponent of the "Alaska Ice Mission" and chairman of Sitnasuak Corp., the largest of the 16 Alaska Native village corporations in the Bering Straits region. ...