Anchorage Daily News

BARROW -- A gallon of unleaded gasoline: $10. Heating fuel: $9.10 a gallon. Electricity: $1.17 per kilowatt hour -- 11 times the national average.

Where are we? Some heavily taxed European nation, or in the future when global fossil fuels have grown dangerously sparse?

Try right now in Barrow.

Soaring oil prices that swelled Alaska's treasury have come back to slam the state, particularly its 170 rural villages.

Gov. Sarah Palin has proposed checks of $1,200 for each resident to help relieve some of the burden, using a surplus from the oil-rich state treasury. In the final hours of the special session, legislators are debating that proposal.

But in far-flung villages, people expect things to get much worse.

The seasonal barge shipments of fuel have yet to arrive, meaning villages are still paying last year's prices. Those prices are already about 60 cents higher than the U.S. average.

Here in Barrow, the nation's northernmost city located just a few hundred miles west of the country's largest oil field, residents pay $4.65 for a gallon of gas. When the barges come, that price tag will be closer to $7.

"I'm tired of everyone else harping on $4 a gallon for gas," said longtime Barrow resident Marvin Olson. "We've been paying that for four years when everybody else was paying $2 a gallon."

High costs are hardly new for many of these villages, but the situation is becoming dire and some are fleeing. There are darkened apartments, abandoned ahead of the coming winter when minus 50 will be considered a nice day. Villages are trying to figure out how they will pay for enough fuel to make it to summer.

In some villages, the season's first snow is barely two months away.

Rural Alaskans will spend 40 percent of their annual income on energy this winter compared with 4 percent for the average Alaska household, according to a University of Alaska Anchorage study published in May.

The Legislature is considering several lifelines, including Palin's proposed relief checks.

This would be in addition to the Permanent Fund Dividend, projected to be about $2,000 this year.

Palin and some lawmakers on a recent trip to Barrow said they're tired of suggestions that Alaska gets more than is fair from the federal trough.

Alaska received $1.84 in federal spending for every $1 the state paid in taxes to Washington, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan organization. The state ranked third, behind New Mexico and Mississippi in 2005, the last year figures were available.

"We are taking care of the challenges we have in Alaska on our own," Palin said. "We are not asking Congress for relief."

A MATTER OF SURVIVAL

Boats and four-wheelers are used to hunt. Besides food, the hides are used for clothing and to line whaling boats.

This whaling community of 4,000 relies on the land and sea to survive.

Animal hides hang from lines. Armed hunters search the Arctic Ocean looking for bearded seals. Off-road vehicles return home weighed down with fresh-caught caribou. There are ceremonies in the center of town to celebrate a successful bowhead hunt.

At a grocery store two blocks away, a loaf of bread goes for $6; a gallon of milk, $10; a dozen eggs, $4.60; a pound of strawberries, $10; a half-pound of lunch meat is $7.

"If we had to go to the store and buy everything, we'd probably be on food stamps by now -- if we didn't have our land and sea animals," said North Slope Borough Mayor Edward Itta. "More and more our take-home pay is going to be spent buying gas to go get caribou, to go get fish, to go to our camps and gather our food."

Fuel-driven changes to tradition are the norm across the Bush.

Henry Horner lives 300 miles southwest of Barrow in the village of Kobuk. He fears gas could reach $12 a gallon by the fall hunting season.

"Normally I run into six or more boats on the water this time," he said. "Where I went on the Kobuk, I was the only one there. I'm still wondering how many of us will be able to go hunting moose and caribou this year."

Barrow is better off than many villages. The community gets subsidized natural gas from nearby fields. It has benefited from oil field property taxes that have helped build new schools and municipal buildings.

Word of hardships in other villages are slowly making their way to Barrow.

People shell out $10 a gallon for unleaded fuel in Anaktuvuk Pass; those from the state's southern coastal region pay $9.10 for heating fuel in Kokhanok; and electricity costs $1.17 a kilowatt hour in Lime Village out west.

The wait for Barrow's next fuel barge shipment in about a month, usually a time of relief, is now a source of growing angst. People know its arrival means gas for the next year could be in the $7 to $8 a gallon range.

Said Barrow whaling captain Jacob Adams: "We could be going back to dog teams if we can't afford the cost of gas for subsistence hunting."

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