King Cove's read: deadly environmentalism: for an Alaska town, the price of a wildlife refuge is paid in human lives.

• Author: Tuttle, Ian
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Building Alaska

The 950 residents of King Cove, Alaska, have been trying to build an emergency road to nearby Cold Bay. They have been trying to build the road for forty years.

King Cove is near the western tip of the Alaskan Peninsula; a few miles west begin the Aleutian Islands. King Cove has a school and two churches and a Chinese restaurant, and its economy is buttressed by the presence of PeterPan Seafoods, one of the largest commercial fishing operations in North America, whose seasonal employees constitute about one-third of the local population. But like most towns in the Alaskan bush, it has only a small clinic and no full-time physician. For everything from minor surgeries to delivering a baby, residents must venture to a proper hospital--625 miles away, in Anchorage.

Rarely can that be done direct from King Cove. The town's 3,500-foot gravel airstrip, built in 1970 in the Delta Creek Valley north of town, cannot accommodate large aircraft, and the single- and twin-engine aircraft that use it are particularly vulnerable to King Cove's weather and geography--which are, to put it lightly, forbidding. The airstrip is situated between two volcanic peaks, which funnel into the valley winds that regularly reach 70 mph. And while clear, calm days do visit King Cove, bad weather--thick fog, lashing rain, driving snow--is Mother Nature's curse on King Cove a third of the year, sometimes more.

So getting to Anchorage requires first getting to next-door Cold Bay, a hamlet of one hundred people, mainly transient state and federal employees, that happens to be home to a ten-thousand-foot, all-weather airstrip capable of handling the long-distance flight to the state's largest city. (Why tiny Cold Bay has such an outsized role in King Cove's story is something of a historical accident: Cold Bay Airport was built in World War II, when this distant patch of the Alaska Territory became a strategic outpost against a possible Japanese invasion. The site chosen, Army engineers agreed then, and locals agree now, was the only one in the area suitable for an airstrip of such size.) The problem is getting to Cold Bay. In clear weather, that can be done with an air taxi from King Cove's airstrip. But when the weather is foul, making the trip to Cold Bay requires a boat (and calm seas) or a medevac helicopter (often supplied by the Coast Guard)--and, potentially, more time than a patient has.

One-Lane Gravel Road

To solve this problem, King Cove residents have sought to build a one-lane, gravel road from King Cove to Cold Bay, across the two-mile-wide isthmus that links the towns. Nineteen miles of the thirty-mile road already exist. But eleven miles remain--and they traverse the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge.

This is one infrastructure project in which the Obama administration has not the slightest interest. In August 2013, with King Cove's decades-long effort seemingly about to come to fruition--a bill having passed Congress, the president having signed it--Sally Jewell, secretary of the Department of the Interior, flew to King Cove and, to people who told her of loved ones waiting desperately for a rescue helicopter, and of friends perishing in plane crashes in the cloud-swathed mountains, announced: "I've listened to...