BILLION A YEAR STOLEN FROM THE PEOPLE

BILLION-DOLLARS A YEAR STOLEN FROM THE PRIVATE SECTOR

by Henry Kroll

AlaskaPublishing.com

There has been a covert war against the private sector to quash opposition to selling oil leases in lower Cook Inlet. This state allowed the destruction of a billion dollar a year renewable resource in favor of a non-renewable resource. We Alaskans are tired of being ripped off and being forced into poverty.

From 1960 to 2000 this state allowed two oil tankers a day to each dump ten-million gallons of ballast water taken from Los Angeles, Honolulu, Anacortes, and Korean boat harbors. Oil tankers have to take on ballast water to run in the open ocean otherwise they will flip over. The contaminated water they brought to Alaska contained trillions of bacteria, algae and nematodes that eat the inside out of the shrimp and crab eggs. You got to do the math to understand how this is possible. Sixty-five billion gallons of contaminated tanker ballast water each year for thirty years plus drill tailings from 200 oil wells, plus oil from military vessels and cruise ships destroyed a billion dollar a year shrimp and crab resource. The state statute fine for dumping ballast water was $500.

I was born in Seldovia and fished king crab twenty-five years. (See enclosed picture of my 72-foot boat Mary M, the house and shop that I built in Halibut Cove. We lost everything due to State greed. We were forced to move onto our salmon fish sites in Tuxedni Bay. Our children suffered because we were destitute. Hundreds of fishermen lost their boats and gear worth a billion dollars.

The fishery is supposed to be a renewable resource but when you got a state intent on raking in Billions from the sale of oil leases the private sector hasn't got a chance. They wanted to make Cook Inlet look like the Gulf of Mexico with oil rigs all down Shelikoff Strait. The State never sold many oil leases in lower Cook Inlet because there is little oil there. This terrible crime and violation of the state constitution was for nothing. It was a crime borrowed from the federal government’s COLD WAR covert-operations of social engineering and mind control. They blamed the fishermen. Because there is no state income tax we, the people mean nothing to them.

 

            From 1960 to 1980 we had a 7.5 to 10 million pound king crab quota in lower Cook Inlet and Kachemak Bay. We also had a 14-million pound king crab quota around Kodiak Island. We used to catch the Cook Inlet quota in three or four weeks starting August 10 to the first week in September. Add those two quotas together and you get 25-million+ pounds. At $10 a pound what would be 250-million dollars. Add an additional 250-million dollars for the loss of the shrimp, Dungeness and snow crab fisheries and you get 500-million dollars a year annual seafood harvest. The processors and retailers would have received another 500-million dollars for the value-added, product. That totals a billion dollars a year lost to the villages of Kodiak Island, Homer and Seldovia. Thousands of fish processors lost their jobs and had to relocate. Hundreds of fishermen including me lost our boats and gear totaling over a billion dollars. It was not only a Constitutional Violation it was a betrayal of public trust and a crime.

Over a 54 year time period the State of Alaska turned a blind eye to the dumping of billions of gallons of oil tanker ballast water into lower Cook Inlet taken from the Los Angeles, Honolulu and Anacortes boat harbors – the primary cause of the demise of the crab and shrimp fisheries in Kodiak and lower Cook Inlet. Between 1960 to 1990 the State of Alaska also ignored leaking underwater oil pipelines and the dumping of drill tailings from over 200 wells and “eight” major oil well blowouts that mixed billions of gallons of oil and natural gas into the tide waters. The tremendous amount of toxins released into the environment reduced the biomass of the plankton blooms and altered the organisms that make up the food chain thus causing the decimation of the shrimp and crab fisheries in Cook Inlet and Kodiak. Twenty-million-gallons of sewage discharged daily from the City of Anchorage and more from Palmer and Wasilla outflows contribute to the ongoing environmental damage robbing crab and shrimp fishermen of approximately a $500,000,000.00 annual resource harvest. Double that for the value added product to the processors and towns equals a billion dollars a year.

It took me a long time to figure this out. At the time, 30-years ago, we didn’t know what was happening to us. Thousands of cannery workers lost their jobs and many processors went bankrupt. Several towns lost their infrastructure and had to depend on State and Federal grants to provide services to their residents. Conservatively speaking, the total cost to the private sector is over billion dollars a year. There is no state income tax so we mean nothing to them.    

In a state documentary EXXON VALDEZE TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE SPILL ‘State biologists stated that they had identified 300 foreign species that were introduced into Prince William Sound from oil tanker ballast water.’ How many species of foreign organisms were not identified? Three thousand?-- thirty thousand? How many foreign organisms like worms and nematodes that bore inside crab and shrimp eggs were introduced into Cook Inlet and Kodiak waters from 1960 to 2014?

We lost the king crab, tanners, Dungeness and shrimp due to pollution in lower Cook Inlet. The salmon will be gone next. The fall floods we have been having the last couple years wash all the eggs out of the nests. The floods also wash all the dead salmon carcasses out of the lakes and streams so that the cocopod bloom in the spring has little fertilizer to grow on. When the few remaining fry have little or nothing to eat they starve and or leave the river about half the size that they should be. Salmon fry don’t survive well in the open ocean when they are undersized and weak from mal-nutrition. They don’t have enough strength to escape from predators. 

Feeder fish like the king salmon and silvers have to eat polluted needle fish and herring with big cancer sores on their sides. What the herring and needle fish have to eat is the wrong food composed of foreign organisms brought in by oil tankers from other parts of the world. Then you have the 20-million gallons per day sewage from Anchorage, Palmer and Wasilla and toxic chemicals. The criminals running this state caused us to lose a billion-dollar a year crab and shrimp fishery. The salmon will be next. It is a crime what they are doing with four hundred outboards discharging exhaust gas into the water of the Kenai River.

You got thousands of tons of road salt dumped on the highways each year. You got hundreds of thousands of gallons antifreeze used to defrost jet planes at Anchorage International Airport. There is an antifreeze dump near the inlet. All that foreign material winds up in Cook Inlet.

During most of the Cold War the B-52 bombers carrying nuclear weapons would dump all their remaining jet fuel into upper Cook Inlet and over the Indian village of Tyonic. Half the weight of a loaded B-52 is fuel. They have to dump most of it before landing on their spindly landing gear at Almondorf in Anchorage. The tires are only two feet in diameter but they carry four hundred pounds per square inch of air pressure. It’s much too dangerous to land a B-52 with nuclear weapons on board with half a load of fuel. If the landing gear were to give way and one of those nukes went off the entire city of Anchorage would disappear in a gigantic cloud of radioactive dust.

The Indian village of Tyonic had the highest cancer rate of any town in the nation. Attorney, Stanley McKutchen sued the Federal Government and won. They stopped dumping jet fuel on Tyonic. Stanley McKutchen is dead. Funny how so many people concerned about the environment are now dead...

Tom, a 79-year old friend said, “There were six of us standing by the runway in Anchorage watching a B-52 come in for a landing. It seemed lower than usual and touched down about 600-feet short of the runway. The tail gunner sits in a bubble that can be released by pulling on a lever. He saw what was happening and immediately released the bubble. The landing gear hit the railroad tracks sheared off. The plane slid down the asphalt runway with sparks and flame…” “Tom said. “She’s going to blow.” “We took off running away from the runway.” The explosion hurled the men thirty feet in the air as they were running. Twelve people were killed in the plane and one on the ground. The tail gunner survived. Tom said, “For the next two days we picked up pieces of bodies.” “A shoe with a foot in it, an arm here, a leg there…”

One more thing you should probably add in my letter to the Editor is the fact the Federal Government didn't build fire breaks on its land and let 300-square miles of timber burn up impacting Funny river, Kenai River, Skilack and Tustamena Lakes. They brought in Canadian firefighting aircraft that dumped tons of red dye, fertilizer mixed with water onto the fire. All that runoff plus tons of charcoal and ashes -- we don't know what effect that will have on the salmon... 

Henry Kroll