Alaska: King Cove will finally get their badly needed road, thanks to President Trump

Daily Caller: Eighteen Alaskans Died Because Feds Killed Plans For An Emergency Road. Trump Is Fixing That.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke will swap federal land with the Aleut of King Cove, Ak., on Jan. 22, answering decades of pleas from local officials to build a road on roughly 500 acres.

King Cove residents have pursued building an 11-mile, single-lane, non-commercial road between King Cove and the Cold Bay Airport for the past 35 years. In that time, at least 18 people have died from causes attributable to not having a road between the community and airport, according to documents obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

King Cove, population 989, occupies a remote peninsula in southern Alaska about 30 miles from Cold Bay, a town of 122 with the area’s only all-weather airport. The proposed road cuts through the 315,000-acre Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, designated in 1960. Congress declared 300,000 acres of the designation as federally protected wilderness in 1980.

King Cove officials have claimed the road is necessary to access the airport in special circumstances, namely medical emergencies. The community has a clinic without a full-time physician, so residents are forced to fly more than 600 miles to Anchorage for major injuries and medical procedures such as childbirth.  read more