A Cutback in Crabbing Quotas Leaves St. Paul Scrambling to Save Its Lifestyle

JIM CARLTON /  WALL STREET JOURNAL 15jan01

ST. PAUL ISLAND, Alaska -- This volcanic outcrop sits as far west as Siberia. But it is policies from faraway Washington, D.C., that send town manager John Merculief bumping around in his Isuzu Trooper, trying to ensure no one goes hungry.

He guides the rusting vehicle onto a wind-whipped promontory, jabbing a finger at a hissing power plant that provides electricity to the concrete homes below. Mr. Merculief hopes to divert some of the plant's excess energy to run a big storage cooler for seal meat, the island's last source of sustenance if all else fails.

This is life at the end of the Earth, on 44 square miles of unimaginably desolate Bering Sea rock. Enslaved by Russian fur traders in the 18th century, and made wards of the U.S. government with the 1867 Alaska Purchase, the people of St. Paul couldn't vote -- or even leave the island without permission -- until 1954. They received food and shelter in exchange for working as seal clubbers, and they slaughtered thousands of the marine mammals, season after season, until Congress stopped the carnage in the early 1980s.

Now the 650 native Aleut people here are supplicants of a different master, the National Marine Fisheries Service, which last year imposed a crippling fishing quota on their latest lifeblood, the Alaskan snow crab.

"We're moving backwards," Mr. Merculief sighs.

St. Paul's plight mirrors the struggle of other fishing communities devastated by slashed harvests. During the past decade, federally imposed cutbacks on cod, flounder and other fish species have wiped out about half the fishing fleet on Massachusetts' Cape Cod, for example. And fishermen from San Diego to Seattle have been squeezed by sharply curtailed limits on endangered rockfish and salmon.

Yet it's much worse here. Unlike other hard-hit communities, there's nothing for residents to fall back on. Though the island of sheer ocean cliffs and tundra-covered hills is starkly beautiful, it lies 200 miles out at sea and is accessible only by small passenger planes which often turn back because of inclement weather. As a result, only about 1,000 tourists a year make the trek, many of them nature lovers out to see the plentiful seals and birds. The island is so isolated -- its nearest neighbor an even smaller island called St. George, where fewer than 100 fellow Aleuts live -- that the villagers still turn out to greet airplanes. And even that diversion is becoming less frequent: One of two passenger airlines that come here recently canceled service due to financial woes.

After the seal harvests ended, it seemed the snow crab would be the island's salvation. With $51 million of state and federal grants, the residents transformed St. Paul into one of the busiest, most modern crab-processing ports in the world. At the peak of the crab boom, in the early 1990s, St. Paul cooked and packed about $90 million worth of crabs a year. For the first time in ages, St. Paul's population edged up. Cable TV, computers and home telephones eroded the islanders' unworldly isolation.

"For a while there, we thought our kids could come back to the island and get a job," says Phyllis Swetzof, the city clerk and a mother of four.

Hope vanished when the crabs went the way of the seals, into a regulatory abyss. The first sign of trouble was when U.S. marine biologists circulated results of their 1999 "biomass study" of the Bering Sea. The number of male snow crabs fell 63% in a year, they found, to an all-time low. They attributed the drop to overfishing and other factors, and Alaska's Fish and Game Department imposed an 85% cut in the crab catch to 29 million pounds last year to replenish the species.

Bob Otto, director of the National Marine Fisheries lab that conducted the study, says he is sympathetic to St. Paul's plight, and notes that his own son is a crab fisherman. But he says it wouldn't be "prudent" to allow crabbing to continue. "The danger is, if we do nothing, it will take longer for the stocks to recover," he says.

Incredulous islanders initially demanded a recount of the survey, and even paid about $12,000 to a Seattle consulting company to review the biomass study for errors. But after the review showed there was no mistake, villagers say they became resigned to the need to give the crab population a rest.

Still, acceptance hasn't eased the pain. When crabs were king, Alex and Rena Kudrin nearly doubled the income they once earned from sealing, to about $1,000 a week each. He operated a crane on the dock, hoisting crabs; she worked as a clerk in a fishing company. They splurged on twice-yearly vacations in Anchorage and gave Christmas presents to about 20 nieces and nephews.

Now, with the crab fleet largely idled, Mr. Kudrin, 51 years old, is jobless, and the family is bracing itself for a long, dark winter of cable TV and cabin fever. Instead of a sleigh-full of Christmas gifts this year, the Kudrins bought just one, for five-year-old Maria, their daughter. "It's called survival," says Mrs. Kudrin, 38.

St. Paul has been thrown into crisis. Layoffs are mounting, a food bank has opened and an exodus from the island has begun that could cripple one of the last intact native communities in the U.S. Mr. Merculief's own son, 25-year-old Ricardo, is among those who have left. He now lives in Seattle, where he builds boats.

"Winter's pretty bleak up here," says the younger Merculief, on a recent visit home, his voice echoing in the empty caverns of the crab-processing plant.

And getting bleaker. Alaska officials recently said catch levels for the 2001 crab season, set to begin Monday, will be about as low as last year's, with no increase in sight for several more years.

St. Paul is trying to come up with a long-range plan to wean itself from crabbing, but the problems are enormous. The main harbor is too small to handle the larger boats used to fish pollock and cod, yet the Bering Sea is too rough most of the year for the smaller halibut craft. So St. Paul has asked Congress for $4 million to expand its port. Even if that money comes through, however, it will take at least three years before work is completed.

For now, the community is making do on about $3 million in federal disaster loans -- and the goodwill of residents. Villagers, each toting two cans of food to donate as admissions, packed into the city's recreation hall one winter night last year for a dance.

Particularly hard hit has been the mainstay of the community, the town government of St. Paul, which has axed about half its 90 workers. A day-care center for city workers was closed, killing five jobs, as was a town-run dental clinic, wiping out two more jobs and islanders' only access to dental care. "You don't know what a luxury that was," laments Ms. Swetzof, the city clerk, who says residents will now have to fly to Anchorage for fillings.

Meanwhile, the tribal-owned Tanadgusix Corp., which stores crab cages, has slashed pay by as much as 50% for its 20 workers. Thousands of the reddish cages lie stacked on the docks, empty. St. Paul's taxicab fleet has dwindled from five to two. The island's food bank feeds more than a dozen families.

Morale has also deteriorated from a string of unrelated woes. Just two days before the 1999 Christmas, an electrical fire broke out in the two-story home of the Rev. Peter Suskuk, beloved priest of St. Paul's Russian Orthodox Church. The volunteer fire force raced to the scene, but couldn't save Father Suskuk's wife or their three young children. Grief-stricken, the clergyman moved away, leaving Mr. Merculief and other town leaders to serve as interim pastors of the church.

The tragic fire also took a toll on St. Paul's sole fire truck, which ruptured its water tank trying to extinguish the blaze. The town bought a used fire truck in Portland, Ore., but unusually severe sea ice blocked it from being brought in by barge. It took another three months for air delivery to be arranged, as townsfolk prayed another fire wouldn't hit.

"Every month's been a new challenge," says Steve Miner, a consultant hired by the island to help devise new business strategies.

Last summer brought the island a brief respite, as a few dozen fishermen earned some quick cash during Alaska's short halibut season. On one foggy afternoon in August, a flotilla of small boats chugged ashore, heaving with Pacific halibut in their hulls. Simeon Swetzof Jr., St. Paul's mayor -- and the husband of Mrs. Swetzof, the clerk -- smiled as he and his teenage daughter tied up with their night's catch of 4,000 pounds of halibut, for which they would get about $2 a pound. If they're lucky, St. Paul's halibut fishermen can earn as much as $100,000 in the brief season, but the fishing is spotty, not nearly as reliable as crabbing was.

Which is where the seals come in. The Aleuts have rights to kill up to 1,500 seals a year for their own subsistence but never needed to during the crab rush. Now, with protein supplies dwindling, Mr. Merculief has applied for a $20,000 federal grant to build a cooler to store the seal meat when the weather turns mild.

Says the 54-year-old town manager, as he steers his truck past scowling bull seals encircled by their barking harems, "In these depressing times, we have to become creative."