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" After a week of ramming through sea ice up to 8 feet thick, the Coast Guard icebreaker Healy is expected to reach Nome, Alaska, today\u2014with a Russian tanker loaded with a winter&amp;#039;s worth of heating oil and gasoline on its tail. The ships have been battling through 300 miles of ice, wind, and cold to re-supply the isolated coastal town of 3500, which needs the fuel to power snow plows, ambulances, fire trucks, police vehicles, and heat 1000 homes through what&amp;#039;s so far been an unusually cold and harsh Alaskan winter (yesterday&amp;#039;s low: \u221236 degrees F with wind chill).  If all goes well, by later today or early tomorrow workers will lay an Arctic-grade fuel hose across the bay, from the Russian tanker Renda to the end of Nome&amp;#039;s 350-foot pier. The ship will nudge in as close to shore as possible, though it won&amp;#039;t have to get too close: The tanker has a mile of hose on board, in 400 foot sections that weigh 800 pounds apiece. It&amp;#039;s estimated that transferring the 1.3 million gallons of fuel will take 45 hours. &amp;quot;Hoses are used to offload fuel all the time. What&amp;#039;s not typical is that this will actually be on ice and it&amp;#039;s been 50 below with wind chill,&amp;quot; says Jason Evans, chairman of the local Sitnasuak Native Corporation. Although officials have been preparing for the transfer all week\u2014building a snow ramp from the pier, staking out the hose&amp;#039;s projected route, and securing the paperwork to allow the unorthodox operation\u2014weather is the wild card. &amp;quot;Diesel can start to gel up at minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit,&amp;quot; Evans says. &amp;quot;If that happens, we&amp;#039;ll have to heat the hose\u2014or delay the offload.&amp;quot; The problems for Nome began last fall, when a massive storm hit coastal Alaska (&amp;quot;the Blizzicane,&amp;quot; Evans calls it). The bad weather prevented Nome&amp;#039;s normal supply of winter fuel from reaching the remote village before it was iced in for the winter. No roads reach the outpost, and flying the fuel into Nome&amp;#039;s tiny airport would be prohibitively expensive. In December, an Alaskan marine cargo company identified a foreign ship, the Renda, available to act as a delivery vessel, as well as a source of fuel in Japan.  To save time, the cargo company, Vitus Marine, planned an offshore transfer: A barge would meet the Renda in the open ocean to deliver the fuel. When gale-force winds and stormy weather prevented that rendezvous, the company looked to a closer fuel source\u2014the Bering Sea fishing port of Dutch Harbor. But then another problem arose: Using a foreign vessel to transport fuel from one American port to another is a violation of the maritime Jones Act. After some multi-agency hoop-jumping and waiver-seeking, the plan received approval, and the Renda loaded up in Dutch before heading north toward Nome.      The Coast Guard&amp;#039;s 420-foot Healy was waiting. America&amp;#039;s Arctic lone icebreaker and its crew of 85 had already been deployed for seven months, much of it spent supporting a scientific mission focused on mapping the Arctic seafloor. The ship was scheduled to return to the Healy&amp;#039;s home port in Seattle before the holidays. Instead, the Healy spent several extra weeks in the Bering Sea waiting for their rendezvous with the Renda. (The Russian ship is ice-classed, but not a true ice-breaker, and thus not capable of safely breaking its own way to Nome). On January 6, the Healy began pushing and ramming the path through the ice, sometimes gaining just a few miles a day. Until recently, the Healy was one of three active, ocean-going Coast Guard icebreakers, the smallest and least powerful ship in the Arctic fleet (considered a &amp;quot;medium&amp;quot; icebreaker, the Healy can break through 4.5 feet of ice at a speed of 3 knots). Today, it is the only one in service. The 399-foot Polar Sea suffered a major engine casualty in 2010 and is now being decommissioned. It&amp;#039;s sister ship, the Polar Star, is currently undergoing a $60 million renovation that involves cannibalizing parts from the Polar Sea. (Both ships are &amp;quot;heavy&amp;quot; icebreakers, built to break through 6 feet of ice at 3 knots of speed). The renovation, which should be complete in 2013, is expected to add only seven to 10 more years to the life of the already 35-year-old ship. Though it generally takes eight to 10 years to build a new icebreaker, no new ships have yet to be commissioned. &amp;quot;The situation in Nome underscores the need to have heavy, polar-class icebreakers on the Alaska coastline,&amp;quot; Alaska Lieutenant Governor Mead Treadwell says. Until recently, Treadwell served as the chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, a group that has been concerned about waning U.S. icebreaker capability for years. This week&amp;#039;s journey to Nome was originally expected to take just a couple days, but dragged out to more than a week. Despite the Healy&amp;#039;s heroic effort, one medium icebreaker is simply not sufficient to support the increasingly complex American interests in the Arctic. &amp;quot;The citizens, the natural resources, the national security of the country, and commerce all deserve to have an all-hazards, all-weather, all-conditions Coast Guard capability,&amp;quot; Treadwell says. &amp;quot;That why we&amp;#039;ve been pressing for heavy icebreakers.&amp;quot; Kalee Thompson is a contributing editor at Popular Mechanics. Her book, Deadliest Sea, about the Coast Guard rescue of the crew of the fishing trawler Alaska Ranger, was published in 2010. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a7327/almost-nome-u-s-icebreaker-about-to-reach-cut-off-alaska-town/>