First barge pushes fuel prices up to near $6 a gallon

ALEX DeMARBAN

May 22, 2008 at 2:40PM AKST

Shortly before the year’s first fuel barge arrived in Dillingham last week — an event that pushed some of the nation’s highest fuel prices even higher — customers crowded the filling station at Delta Western.

“It was swamped,” sales representative Jeff Evalt said.

Customers had come to snatch up the last of the year’s supply.

Then on Wednesday, May 14, the barge arrived, prices rose and the place emptied. Heating fuel jumped $1.50 a gallon to $5.74, and gasoline at the pump rose about $1 to $5.97.

“No one’s been around,” Evalt said. “We scared them all off.”  

The prices will rise even higher for many other villages and hub cities in Western Alaska, as barges steam further down the supply chain delivering the first fuel since winter’s end.

It’s a dreaded moment in many villages, where diesel fuel powers generators and heats houses and gasoline fills snowmachines and boats for subsistence hunting and fishing trips.

Alaska’s average gas prices were the first in the nation to pass the $4 benchmark. But the state’s rural gas prices have been significantly higher than that for months, in some cases years.

People in Bethel are expecting gas prices to jump $1.50 a gallon to about $5.30 when the barge arrives in June, said Lori Walters, the city’s finance director.

The store manager in the village of Goodnews Bay, about 100 miles west of Dillingham, wasn’t sure how much gas would rise when the barge arrived. But he expects heating fuel to jump $1.50 a gallon to $6.60.

“That one has me most worried,” Evan S. Evan said.

Nearly half the residents in the village of 250 live below the poverty line. He doesn’t know how some of them will pay for it.

Alaskans may get some help from the Legislature.

Gov. Sarah Palin unveiled a $1.2 billion, one-year plan last week that takes money from the state’s massive, oil-buoyed surplus and shifts it to Alaskans.

The plan would give every Permanent Fund Dividend recipient a $100-per-month debit card to buy gas, heating fuel or power. She also suggested giving grants to electric utilities to cut ratepayers’ costs by 60 percent.

The proposal is meant to be a temporary fix until Steve Haagenson, the state’s energy coordinator, develops a long-term cost-relief plan.

Legislators will take up the subject of energy cost relief in a special session this summer. They might accept Palin’s short-term plan, replace it with one of their own or do nothing.

Some rural leaders praised Palin’s plan. Nels Anderson Jr. of Dillingham, the state’s former rural energy advisor, said the idea would immediately lower energy bills for Alaska consumers.

He’s hopeful the long-term plan will do the same.

“I am confident that at some point in the very near future we will have an energy policy that is fair and equitable to all, an economic policy that will add value to our nonrenewable and renewable natural resources before we ship them out,” he wrote in an e-mail to Palin and others.

Until then, people like Chow Taylor, Dillingham’s city manager, will continue to keep the heat down in her house.

After the barge arrived there, she nearly filled the tank of her small Subaru Legacy, stopping at $50.

 
“I just put in my credit card and closed my eyes and tried not to cry,” she said.

Alex DeMarban can be reached at (907) 348-2444 or (800) 770-9830, ext. 444.