“Nineteen eighty was the first crash,” said Garry Hennigh, the longtime city manager of King Cove, Alaska. The fishing village of just several hundred people, most of them native, is extremely remote, and surrounded by volcanoes in the Aleutians—an island chain that juts into the Bering Sea between America and Russia. It is nearly 900 miles from Anchorage.
And Anchorage is where Tom Phillips needed to be. Hennigh recounts the story. Phillips was a fisherman who’d just had his leg ripped off in a freak boating accident. Cathy Hoff, King Cove’s only medical care provider, was insistent that Phillips be taken to a hospital in the state’s largest city to save his life. The issue was, King Cove only has a single gravel airstrip that is unusable, on average, 100 days out of the year owing to inclement weather. This was one of those days. There was an all-weather airport 18 miles away in Cold Bay, but no road to get there.
In the end, PenAir, the local carrier, decided to take the risk and fly out of King Cove. Hoff jumped onto the plane to help, as did another fisherman, Darien Gorsinger.
“They crashed right before they got to Cold Bay,” Hennigh told me. “The Coast Guard came and found everybody dead about six hours later.”
Hennigh says this tragedy kick-started serious efforts to get a gravel road built between King Cove and Cold Bay. However, more than 40 years later, people are still dying—19 in total have passed, he says, either from lack of urgently needed medical care or via plane crash—and the road still hasn’t been built.
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