When the weather cooperates, patients can reach Anchorage in a matter of hours. But when conditions are bad, there’s no way out—patients are stranded with their lives on the line.
To resolve this, the people of King Cove have had a simple ask since the 1970s: to build a road to connect them to the nearby community of Cold Bay.
Cold Bay’s origins are much more recent than King Cove. In 1941, concerned about the risk of an invasion on U.S. soil, the military chose it as the location of an airfield. Thousands of American troops were stationed there and built infrastructure, including dozens of miles of roads, to support their wartime operations.
At present, Cold Bay is no longer a military outpost and has only about 50 residents. The community’s primary asset is its airport, which features one of the longest runways in Alaska. Unlike King Cove’s short gravel strip, Cold Bay’s airport can serve larger planes and operates in nearly all weather conditions.
It’s easy to understand why King Cove residents want a road to Cold Bay: Driving there would be far safer, faster, and more reliable than any other mode of transportation. Their relatives helped build Cold Bay’s runway during World War II, and existing roads on each side—one out of King Cove, the other from Cold Bay—have left just 11 short miles to connect.
In most of America, that road link would have been built long ago without a second thought. But in this instance, those 11 miles fall within the 315,000-acre Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, most of which Congress designated as federal wilderness in 1980 through the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA).
Izembek’s designation occurred without consultation of the local Alaska Native people—the legislative record indicates public meetings were held in Anchorage and Cold Bay but not King Cove. Adding insult to injury, elders recall being shocked as U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees burned their subsistence cabins within the newly designated refuge shortly after ANILCA’s passage.
The absence of reliable access to emergency medical care has had predictable results in King Cove. A baby was born prematurely on a boat and kept warm in its oven during a rough, multi-hour journey to Cold Bay. An elder with broken bones endured a similar boat trip and was hoisted to Cold Bay’s dock in a crab pot because they were unable to climb its treacherous 20-foot ladder.
Worse still, at least 20 lives have been lost—12 in plane crashes and the others during lengthy medevacs.
Amid generations of unnecessary trauma and death, King Cove has tried just about everything to resolve this situation—even a hovercraft, which failed because it could not operate in extreme weather. They have signed numerous land exchange agreements with the federal government to trade tens of thousands of acres of their Native lands for a small federal land corridor, only to see those agreements opposed by outside environmental groups and tied up in the courts.
The only solution is the most obvious: a short, gravel, one-lane, non-commercial road through a small fraction of the Izembek refuge. Yet, even when bipartisan legislation gave the U.S. Department of the Interior the ability to approve such a road in 2013, they said no, claiming that impacts on migratory birds would be too great. The land exchange under that legislation would have been nearly 300:1 in the federal government’s favor, but it still wasn’t enough.
Since that decision was made, Fish and Wildlife Service employees have continued to drive on military-built roads within Izembek, with no apparent impact on birds or any other wildlife. But King Cove has no such connection, and its residents have endured well over 200 medevacs over the past decade alone. The U.S. Coast Guard carried out more than 30 of those, at great personal risk to their pilots and crews and millions of dollars in costs to taxpayers.
The courage and skill required to make it from King Cove to Cold Bay in severe conditions are incredible—but also unnecessary—and not every victim makes it to care in time. Just a few months ago, a local resident passed away en route to Anchorage after being stranded in King Cove for 27 hours. An ambulance to Cold Bay would have taken about an hour and likely saved their life.
As we grapple with climate change, all of us will need to adjust our thinking about what is appropriate and necessary—from the types of energy we use to highly localized decisions that protect our fellow citizens from harm. What we will learn is that climate justice comes in many forms and, in a place like Alaska, can be driven just as much by the current climate as it is by projected change.