If you build it, they will come
posted in Uncategorized |One of the lovely advantages of having a good internet connection is the ability to look up things that interest you, quickly and easily. And, say, read government PDF documents. (Unhindered By Talent notes how having the internets at your fingertips is akin to former years’ having an encyclopedia handy in the house.)
So yesterday, we wandered down to Port MacArthur, as I mentioned in passing in my previous post. To get there, we took the road down to Knok (for a piCNIC in KNOK, har har). Then we drove down to Loon Bay, where the road ended up dead-ending at a grassy airstrip in the middle of some trees.
Loon Bay turning out a disappointment, we were driving back, and passed a sign to Port MacArthur.
Imagining a quaint, run-down old Alaska port, I pointed down the road and said, “Let’s go there!”
So we drove. The paved road ended and the gravel road began. But, dayum, that was a sweet gravel road–wide, spacious, flat, surrounded by the usual thickets of trees and underbrush. And it kept going. There were very very few other drivers.
Soon, I saw, in the sky, a jet. And then another. And then we saw the Inlet. We drove a little further, to an intersection in the middle of nowhere, with stop signs. ?? We turned. We drove a bit more.
And there, at the end of this 14-mile drive, was the port.
Brand spanking new.
Deep-water dock (one).
Angled flume to bring unknown cargo down to the ships.
Quiet. Deserted. A sign about security, but easy enough for the dotter and the dawg to just skip around the sides of the gate.
And there, across the inlet, close enough to spit on (well, almost–it’s about 4 miles), was Big City, with all its port facilities and docks and 300,000 people and the international airport.
We returned back home curious and intrigued. We did a search on Port MacArthur (not the real name). And we found the most interesting stuff, including the aforementioned government PDF documents…
Let’s talk about the “Bridge To Nowhere” again.
There are actually two such bridges which were lumped together in Senator Stevens’ and Representative Don Young’s multi-billion dollar pork dealie.
One is a bridge between Ketchikan and Gravina Island. Gravina Island is where the airport for Ketchikan sits. There’s a ferry that goes between the two every fifteen minutes. For some reason, the Alaska Powers That Be want a bridge there instead.
The PTB also want a bridge between Big City and Port MacArthur. Salon happily called the Port MacArthur area a place where 1 person resides, and sneered at Knok as a bustling megalopolis of 22, carefully ignoring the fact that there are 66,000+ people living within minutes of Knok in an area that is estimated to grow almost ten times the population within 20 to 30 years. The general consensus is that Stevens Young et al. want the bridge to benefit the son-in-law (? some sort of relative, at least), who owns a whopping 80 acres of land right by the port, and it’s just to give big bucks to the bridge builders and let son-in-law sell his waterfront property to rich folks who want swanky homes on the Inlet.
But nosing around things in relation to the port, we discovered that it’s not a small plan at all.
Y’see, let’s look at transportation in Big City.
They’ve got an international airport. The city is growing. They need more flight capability. But the airport is right in the middle of town, constrained by its neighbors. They can’t build a new one inland, because there’s a whole slew of mountains tied up in a state park. They can’t build to the east, because that state park comes right down to the Inlet to the south. They can’t build to the west, because suburbia is already sprawling that way, plus there’s an inconvenient military base or two in the way as well.
But…but…a mere four miles away, right across the Inlet, there’s hundreds of thousands of acres of empty land, and a borough that has ambitions and (perhaps?) a desire for an influx of tax and federal money.
Also, any goods that are unloaded in the port at Big City that are due to go north have to detour east around the Inlet, and then west again, before they go north. But…but…if there were a road at Port MacArthur…or a railroad…and more of a port…the ships could unload there, and land transportation would shave about one hour and sixty or so miles off the trip for each trailer coming off any container ship. Ditto for any cargo going out, like, say, coal, or lumber, or oil.
We’re talking Big Bucks here.
Build that bridge. Pave that road (scheduled to have been done this summer, but it looks like it’ll be another year or so). Suddenly, shipping that comes into Big City can bypass that sixty miles/one hour detour, and head north right away.
And it just so happens that the Master Plan for 2020 includes a “preferred location” for the new international airport.
Just north of Port MacArthur.
So imagine you want to grow. Imagine you have thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of folks who would like a less expensive place to live. Imagine you want to move your airport. Imagine you’d like to save millions–maybe billions–on shipping costs.
If you only had an itty bitty 4-mile-long bridge…
(Currently there are also plans for a passenger ferry, which, of course, the Sierra Club and others infinitely prefer. But if the long-term plans are truly what is outlined in those government documents, a ferry just won’t do, not at all.)
Anyway, it’s very interesting what you can find on the internet as the result of a tourist jaunt to a quaint, deserted port.
By the way, none of the journalists’ stories I’ve found so far on the “Bridge To Nowhere” seem to have any clue about all this ambitious expansion, this brand-new industrial complex that is envisioned. They’re just too busy having fun poking at bridges to empty, unpopulated land, and yammering about pork.
Yeah, it’s pork, but lemme tell you, it’s pork with sweep and vision. It’s not a “Bridge to Nowhere”…it’s a case of “If you build it, they will come.”
