$220 Million to build a bridge to an island with fifty people!
Taken from a plastic.com discussion of this issue:
"I live in Ketchikan, Alaska, the city which will be getting the now-infamous bridge, and I'd like to tell those of you who have never visited Ketchikan a little bit about the area so you can judge for yourselves what a flagrant and shameless waste the bridge project is.
To start with, a short list of facts.
- Ketchikan is located in the extreme southeast corner of the state of Alaska, on an island just off a narrow strip of coastal land which belongs to the USA, bordered on the interior by the Canadian province of British Columbia.
- The City of Ketchikan has about 8,000 residents, as mentioned above, but it is probably more accurate to include the people living outside the city limits in the Ketchikan Gateway Borough, another 5,000 or 6,000 people who share schools, library services, post offices and a number of other infrastructure services with the city and generally consider themselves to live in Ketchikan.
- Virtually everyone who lives in either the city of Ketchikan or the Ketchikan Gateway Borough live along a long narrow strip of coastal land along the southwest edge of Revillagigedo Island for two reasons: (a) because of our climate and terrain, very little land here is suitable for building, and (b) virtually all of the rest of the land around us belongs to either the US Forest Service, the State of Alaska, or Alaska Native corporations that represent the interests of their tribal shareholders.
- Ketchikan is located in the Tongass National Forest, the US portion of a vast coastal rain forest that spreads over hundreds of miles and thousands of islands of varying sizes.
Now for a few specifics about the bridge.
Here are two pictures of the area where the bridge is scheduled to be built. The pictures are taken from a spot north of the bridge site, looking southeast down the Tongass Narrows. The first shows the east channel of the narrows, the second shows a better idea of the setting. The small island in the middle of the channel is Pennock Island, which will connect the two spans of the proposed bridge.
This article includes a nice overview map showing the proposed bridge route and should help put the route in perspective.
Having established a bit about the location of the bridge, let's look at a map of the road systems that it will connect. Notice how, apart from the airport, there's no road system on Gravina Island for this bridge to connect to. That's because the only development on Gravina Island to date consists mainly of (a) the airport, (b) about 30-40 homes and cabins scattered along the shoreline, accessible only by boat. Return for a moment to the Google map above and click the "Hybrid" button to overlay a satellite image of the area on top of the street map. Notice all of the small bodies of water on the portion of Gravina Island where the bridge will connect. That's muskeg, a common terrain type here in the north — treacherous soft bog, particularly unsuited for development or road construction. Here in Ketchikan we receive about 160 inches of rain per year. Ground that is level is practically never dry, and ground that is dry is practically never level. Ground that's already soft and boggy to start with is just a disaster to try and build on; it can swallow houses, roads, anything you try to put on it.
Why would you build a bridge to an island with no people and almost no developable land under private ownership? Only a few convincing reasons come to mind:
- You might be motivated to do so if you were the Chairman of the House Transportation Committee and didn't measure success except in terms of dollars delivered to your district.
- You might want a bridge if you wanted to log currently-roadless areas of state and federal timber lands on Gravina Island.
- Or you might want a bridge if you were one of the few property owners with substantial chunks of buildable property on Gravina Island.
- And, though it shames me to say it of my neighbors, you might want a bridge if you saw it as $220 million dollars of federal money that was coming into a community still reeling economically from declines in the timber and commercial fishing industries and rather conflicted about the growth of cruise-ship tourism.
None of which strike me as adequate reasons to ask the rest of the country to pick up the tab for a $220,000,000 bridge.. But I guess that's (one of many reasons) why I'll never be an Alaska Congressman."
Posted by duver001 at August 18, 2005 02:12 PM
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