To Homepage
Alaska Trekker
Alaska Cruises

Residents in Barrow Alaska Fear Mail Change

print Print

6/23/06

Barrow, Alaska   

From the Washington Post

Life here was simpler, if less nutritious, 40 years ago.

A serving of vegetables might be a dash of dried onion flakes and a limp carrot tossed in a stew, but today cooks can find carrots with crunch at well-stocked local grocery stores. Barrow Alaska

They can thank bypass mail, a U.S. Postal Service program which pays air carriers to deliver the mail and charges shippers third and fourth class postal rates for what is essentially first class service. It accounts for more than 80 percent of the total mail volume in Alaska, most of it canned goods, soda, produce and other groceries.

Bypass mail not only ensured the regular delivery of goods and groceries to 139 remote Alaska villages but also spurred development of a busy air-transport system across the state.

So locals worried when the Postal Service recently announced Barrow's bypass mail no longer would be flown directly from Fairbanks, but instead trucked 300 miles up a gravel two-lane supply road to Deadhorse, a settlement for Prudhoe Bay oil workers, then flown the remaining 200 miles to Barrow.

Grocers say they have seen a marked difference since the new system went into effect June 5.

In Wainwright, a coastal village of 700 people southwest of Barrow, store manager Linda Nayakik last week tossed half a case of potatoes and bags of garden salad that turned rotten just days after they arrived.

Her latest shipment showed up a week late, she said, and the freezer goods were almost thawed.

Aqamak Okpik, who grew up in Barrow and works as a nutritional adviser with low-income families, noticed a $4.50 head of iceberg lettuce she bought for a Father's Day meal was limp the next day.

"It's hard to get people to eat fruits and vegetables anyways because it's so expensive, and now we're going to take the quality and make it a little bit yuckier," she said.

Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, authored the legislation in 1970 that created bypass mail to serve the state's many far-flung villages. Groceries generally arrived in these subsistence-based communities once a year by barge.

Stevens spokeswoman Janel Causey added a spin-off benefit of the program has been regular passenger air service for communities that might not have been served otherwise.

It's a money-losing proposition for the Postal Service_ to the tune of $50 million to $70 million a year, said Steve Deaton, a Fairbanks-based operations specialist with the Postal Service.

He said trucking the mail to Prudhoe Bay will save the Postal Service an estimated $1.4 million a year and still get the mail to Barrow within the seven- to 10-day service standards. The food is arriving in Prudhoe Bay in good shape via temperature-controlled vans where it is stored in similarly controlled facilities, he said.

The Fairbanks-based air carriers are still figuring out the logistics, but they say the real test of the new system will come this winter as they try to get in and out of these often fog-bound Arctic communities.

The new system also costs them more, they say, and that will have to be accounted for next time the postal rates are set, further driving up prices in bush Alaska.

Nevertheless, carriers are scrambling to deal with the change. Alaska Airlines has started routing its combined cargo-passenger planes through Deadhorse to pick up the mail and, contrary to predictions, the airline has not raised passenger fares, business being buoyed so far by the busy travel season.

Robert Ragar, cargo director for Everts Air Cargo, said the companies are trying to make the best of things. No one wants to lose a prized contract to competitors.

"It's not like we have a choice, except to say no, and I don't think any of us want to do that yet," he said.

AlaskaReport.com is a privately owned Alaska news, weather, and information website based in Anchorage, Alaska.

All images, media, and content copyright © 1999 – 2024 AlaskaReport.com – Unless otherwise noted – All rights reserved