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| December 13, 2006 Red Alert by Soren Wuerth Ketchikan Sacrificing Its Health
I came down the mountain and, emerging from the shadows of the deep forest, saw the first glint of Ketchikan in the shiny skin of a candy wrapper. Closer to the parking lot, there was more litter in the shrubs and muskegs, refuse downwind of a landfill. I wondered if the residents living below the edifice of trash had safe water to drink and fresh air to breathe. During the summer, the stench of the landfill hangs like humidity in that neighborhood. I decided to explore a spur road opposite the dump. Cresting a small hill, I saw another garbage dump, this one comprised of industrial waste. A 55-gallon drum laying its side was the origin of a stain that blacked the gravel the length of a trailer. In Ketchikan, pollution is as common as the rain. During its diseased, half-century lifetime, the pulp mill here disgorged toxins into the ocean, piled them on land and spewed them out into the air. I recently heard that citizens are now blaming the mill for a “cancer cluster” of victims who lived downwind. Occasionally, you’ll hear someone brave enough to ask the question: why has the populace allowed its politicians to let this place become so ugly and unhealthy? At a city council meeting the other day, a man challenged the water utility’s failure to bring local drinking water in line with EPA standards for clean water. “It seems strange to me that I’ve been getting notices for over two and half years that the water we drink in this town is not safe,” he said. “I don’t how that can be … water is fundamental to us all.” Rather than trace the problem to the town’s own bungling and mismanagement of its utility, a council member complained that the EPA fine was government “extortion.” And you don’t have to look too far in the past to find that Ketchikan has sacrificed community health for the aggrandizement of a few greedy bastards and corporate enterprises. The boarded windows of storefront after storefront of downtown businesses are Exhibit A of a town that serves the whims of the cruise ship industry. “They’re our bread and butter,” a guy once told me. But, bread and butter, nourishment, is not what the town capitulates itself for. People in Alaska communities a lot more desperate than Ketchikan have bread and butter … homemade butter, even. What this town really sacrifices its health for is to allow a sliver of a minority of residents to getting exceedingly rich, while ensuring handsome profits for the outside businesses that gleefully exploit local resources and leave their filth and scarred landscapes behind. So, there is only tepid support for recycling, the water utility is underfunded, roads are in dismal shape, grandiose schemes of Outside entrepreneurs are rushed through, and, given risks to community health and safety, many residents will only mutter something about a bridge. But I guess I knew this about Ketchikan before moving here. It is, after all, where Frank Murkowski was raised. Years from now, though, when I enter the forest, climb the good Deer Mountain, and stand on its precipice; will I stand next to the terminus of a tram (currently proposed)? Will I look out over Gravina Island and see most of it clearcut and striated with roads (currently underway)? And will I see a town sick, ugly and in despair? Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist, and is the winner of the Alaska Press Club's 2006 'Best Columnist' award. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com. 'Red Alert' appears on insurgent49.com every Wednesday. |
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