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Alaska is to get a hovercraft

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Hovercraft May Ease Travel Problems Between Alaska Peninsula Villages
By DAN JOLING Associated Press Writer
The Associated Press

ANCHORAGE, Alaska Apr 16, 2005 — Mattie Samuelson remembers the harrowing trips aboard a fishing boat that were once the most common way to travel between two villages on the Alaska Peninsula, sailing through a choppy green ocean covered in foam.

Samuelson, a retired health aide, regularly escorted patients from the village of King Cove across 18 miles of turbulent water to the tiny community of Cold Bay when the weather was too threatening to fly.

Now, Alaska officials hope to make the trip less risky with help from the federal government to build a hovercraft.


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A dozen people have died and more have been injured in the past 25 years attempting to make the trip. Several perished in plane crashes and an undetermined number of others died during medical emergencies because they could not reach help in time.

The two small communities are connected by land, and residents continue to push for a road. But blocking the way is a huge wildlife refuge.

In the past, Samuelson said, patients with medical emergencies had to hitch rides aboard fishing boats. In winter, they sometimes had to break through ice to reach the dock. Patients confined to stretchers were hoisted aboard with the same boom used to unload crab pots.

Depending on the size of the boats and tides, travelers might have to climb 10 to 16 feet up an ice-encrusted ladder to reach a dock a quarter-mile from shore at Cold Bay.

"You wait for the boat to go up, and go down and go for the ladder," said Della Trumble, whose niece was born on a boat making the crossing. "It's a timing thing."

Trumble, an administrator with the East Aleutians Tribes, made the crossing many times to reach the airport in Cold Bay for trips to Anchorage or other villages.

The trip was especially hard on people who were susceptible to seasickness. "It's not comfortable at all if you have any sort of medical problem," Trumble said.

For years, residents of King Cove, a village of more than 700 on the Gulf of Alaska coast, have sought better access to Cold Bay, which has only 100 residents but offers a deep-water port and an all-weather airport.

King Cove residents, backed by the Alaska congressional delegation, wanted to build a one-lane, 27-mile gravel road for ambulances and other vehicles, but standing between the communities is the 315,000-acre Izembek National Wildlife Refuge.

The refuge contains North America's largest eelgrass bed and is best known for the huge number of brant, a small sea goose, that stop there during migrations to their breeding grounds. The entire Pacific population of black brant, approximately 150,000 birds, can be seen in the Izembek Lagoon area every fall.


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Conservation groups fought the proposal, fearing that roads through other wilderness areas would follow.

As a compromise, Congress agreed in 1998 to provide the $8.8 million hovercraft as part of a $35 million transportation plan.

The 95-foot hovercraft, under construction in Seattle, should be finished within a year. It will seat 47 passengers and travel an average of 52 mph. The vessel will also offer space for an ambulance and other cargo.

The hovercraft will be built to withstand the region's punishing weather, including operating routinely in waves of more than 6 feet and winds up to 46 mph.

Local officials are constructing a gravel road for residents to drive to the hovercraft terminal from King Cove. Other parts of the project include building a passenger terminal at Cold Bay, plus landing ramps.

King Cove officials also hope the vessel will help the community's seafood industry by transporting shipments on a 20-minute run to Cold Bay, where they can be flown to market within a day.

"We would have preferred a road," said Aleutians East Borough Administrator Bob Juettner, explaining the decision by Congress to offer an alternative. "Under the circumstances, the hovercraft best fits our needs."


On the Net:

Aleutians East Borough: www.aleutianseast.org/

From ABC News
 
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