KOTZEBUE – Shipping salmon is hard to justify when the fish is worth a lot less than the cost of transport. But the people of the Northwest Arctic Borough solved this problem Monday afternoon with the help of seven Kodiak Air Station service members who made a fish run to Kotzebue aboard a C-130.

The Coast Guard transport effort is just one of many efforts to bring food relief to what may be the most expensive place to live in the U.S. In the town of Kotzebue milk costs between $10 and $12 a gallon. In the 10 villages surrounding Kotzebue, prices are much steeper.

Except for the Red Dog zinc/lead mine, most jobs in the Northwest Arctic Borough town are public sector.

Wells Fargo personal banker Brenda Erlich began organizing the food delivery back in March with the help of an organization for Native employees of Wells Fargo. While organizing a food drive through the Food Bank of Alaska, she learned the cost to transport the food often was more expensive than the cost of the food.

Erlich began making phone calls.

The group also received help from local air carriers ATS, Frontier, and Bering Air who will carry the salmon to the villages. Aviation company FBX donated the use of its hangar.

Washington-based nonprofit Sea Share donated the salmon, which came from Sitka. Sea Share is a group originally founded to provide a charity destination for Bering Sea by-catch.

More than 90 percent of residents in the Northwest Arctic depend on some level of subsistence hunting and fishing said NANA regional corporation vice president Walter Sampson. Local hunters depend on caribou and moose, while fishers bring in white fish, sheefish and chum salmon. More than three-quarters of the population is Native, mostly Inupiat Eskimo.

“People are excited about the silver salmon,” Sampson said. “It’s different from the chum.”

The C-130 was piloted by Kodiak Air Station commanding officer Capt. Bill Deal.

Deal said general humanitarian work like delivering salmon is not uncommon in the Coast Guard. But he said such work is rare in Alaska except for smaller programs like Kodiak’s Santa to the Villages.

The C-130 crew originally planned to stop in Kotzebue as part of a trip to the Coast Guard facility in Port Clarence. But the crew scrapped the Port Clarence landing because it was dark by the time the plane left Kotzebue. It is unsafe to land on the Port Clarence runway in the dark.

The program delivered 300 boxes of fish to families in Kotzebue and 870 boxes to families in outlying villages. Each box contains about 35 pounds of meat — only enough for a few meals, but important protein for families trying to get by, Erlich said.

“At first, it was going to be one fish, one family” she said. “But there have been more families than fish.”

More than 6,000 additional pounds of salmon should arrive in a later Coast Guard flight that will also carry dry goods like rice, flour and sugar.

In a presentation at the Kotzebue Airport leaders from the Northwest Arctic Borough and NANA thanked the Coast Guard and the other groups that helped bring the salmon to Kotzebue.

“Our part in this was very small,” Capt. Deal said. “We just brought the fish up.”

The Northern Lights Dancers performed a set of dances, which included an invitational dance that brought the Coast Guard crewmembers onto the dance floor.

Afterward, the Coast Guard crew retired to the NANA building for a meal of caribou-meat chili.

“As you can see, we’re not starving,” Erlich said. “But out in the villages we’re not sure how it is . . . I can’t wait until the fish actually gets to the families. Then I’ll be really happy.”

Within a few hours of the C-130’s arrival in Kotzebue, families began arriving at a tribal government quanza hut to claim the fish.

Mirror Writer Sam Friedman can be reached via e-mail at sfriedman@kodiakdailymirror.com.