Off the Grid?

I wasn’t exactly sure what “we’re off the grid” meant until I asked Carol Foster of Sand Point, AK who explained it to me, “We don’t have any roads out here. The only way to get to the towns that are here to is by plane or sea.” I was talking at the Southwest Alaska Economic Summit and Municipal Conference, composed of towns and islands located along the Aleutian Peninsula. The largest town is Kodiak with a population of 6,334.

The main industry is fishing. Carol told me, “We fish for pollack and cod from January to April; halibut in February; salmon from June to September; and then pollack and cod for the rest of the year.

The next time that I have a town complain to me about being located off the interstate grid, whether they claim they are from forgotonia, boonyacksville, can’tget-therefromhere, or any other such place, I’m going to remind them of what I learned from the people of SW Alaska.

“It takes us 2 ½ hours by plane to get to Anchorage. We only have one flight per day. We have a ferry one time per month, only during the summer. A typical round-trip plane ticket to Anchorage is $800 or $900,” Carol Foster explained to me about their isolation. Carol is from Sand Point (population 952), which is 560 miles from Anchorage. Kodiak is the closest at 250 miles. Dillingham (population 2,466) is 350 miles away; Unalaska (4,283) 800 miles; Adak (316) 1200 miles; and Attu (20) 1500 miles. It is 1/3 as far from Attu to the Russian mainland as it is to Anchorage!

Having only one major industry and extreme isolation creates some unique issues for SW AK. Costs of ordinary consumer goods are extremely high, in some cases 10 times what they would cost in the lower 48. I’m not sure how you overcome some of those issues, but tomorrow I’ll talk about some ideas on how this region of Alaska might be able to diversify away from being a fishing monoculture.