The King Cove-Cold Bay road keeps bobbing to the surface like the proverbial sore thumb. I spent 16 years in rural northwestern Alaska as a physician (radiologist). I am very familiar with the weather and transportation challenges impacting urgent and life-threatening medical evacuations from remote villages to Anchorage. I oppose this road, not only for the legitimate environmental concerns it has generated, but probably more so for the political chicanery that has enveloped its promotion. Kindly allow me to explain:
Nome serves as a hub for some 15 widely scattered villages. Only one, Teller, is connected to Nome by a gravel state highway. And this "already built" road is unmaintained and impassable at least six to seven months per year. Little Diomede doesn't even have an airstrip. No one is proposing to build a one-lane road connecting any of the other villages to Nome's 6001-foot runway and spending whatever it takes to keep it passable year-round. Ditto Kotzebue, Bethel (with over 50 villages) and other parts of our state.
I learned from the Department of Transportation recently that the Taylor Highway to Eagle, a village on the Yukon River near Canada, is unmaintained and impassable at least six months a year. This also is a state highway open to public and commercial traffic. And it is only oil, Alaska's lifeblood, that keeps the Dalton Highway clear year-round. Yet Alaska politicians and others are pushing to build some 10 miles of one-lane road through treacherous and challenging terrain, and maintain a 33-mile road link from King Cove to Cold Bay year-round, and for medical evacuations only! King Cove, with its upgraded clinic and (now abandoned) hovercraft, is well ahead of most remote Alaska villages in medical preparedness. All of this begs the question: "Why is King Cove so important, in a category all its own?"
Answer: The King Cove-Cold Bay road has become an ideological chigger that has burrowed under the skin of anti-wilderness and anti-federal lands politicians and supporters who would love nothing more than to plow a road through federally-designated wilderness just for spite. And what better altruistic cover than "dead Aleut vs. live bird and eel grass" sloganeering. For shame. Many of these folks are likely the same ones who tripped over themselves in a stampede to link hands with Papa Pilgrim when he tried to blaze a trail to his homestead in Wrangell St. Elias National Park, only to quietly scurry away when Pilgrim's brutality and incest was exposed. And leave it to Paul Jenkins to bring Hitler on board (ADN Sept. 13). The unconscionable subterfuge knowingly inherent in this charade disturbs me.
Fact check #1: Folks in Cold Bay have been known to walk through drifting snow a quarter-mile from school to home over impassable roads. Maintaining a 33-mile road under such conditions?!
Fact check #2: Road promoters mollify environmentalists by saying the road will be gated. Any Alaskan not born yesterday knows a gate is an "invitation" to drive around it. And in remote tundra Alaska, this would be laughably effortless.
Fact check #3: Road promoters assuage environmentalists by saying the road will be non-commercial. Only Alaskans actually born yesterday would believe this. If constructed and maintained for medical evacuations only, these "million dollar medevacs" would be the most expensive in the world, second only to a medevac from the international space station!
Guaranteed, this road would be incrementally commercialized from day one. First, single-use permits under escort. Then, after the inevitable "report" comes out showing "no significant impact" when the birds are not resident, it will be opened to seasonal use. And so forth…
Agatha Christie's fictional detective Hercule Poirot always talked about using "the little gray cells," referring to his brain. Alaskans need to use theirs and see this road for what it really is.
Bill Cox has practiced radiology in Alaska for more than 30 years. He lives in Anchorage.
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