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... The Federal Government shouldn't own any land if they can't take care
of it…
Henry
Kroll
