OIL FIELD CHANGES VILLAGE'S LIFESTYLE

In The Shadow Of Alpine

On top of two whining snowmachines, Delbert Napageak and his younger
brother headed south across the tundra. Seventeen-year-old Delbert
carried a rifle. It was early on a March morning. He was hunting wolf.

The same day, their mother, Vera, climbed behind the wheel of a 3-ton
gravel loader, a new sort of job for this Eskimo woman. She spent the
next 12 hours hauling rock to build a new oil field eight miles to the
north.

In their two directions, Delbert on a wolf hunt, Vera to a wage-paying
job, mother and son represent the changes besetting this remote Eskimo
village, Alaska's latest boomtown.

Nuiqsut is in a new stage of an old American story: A distant,
resource-rich community finds itself in the path of progress. Long the
closest Native village to the nation's largest oil fields, Nuiqsut is
on the doorstep of the Slope's latest prize: Arco Alaska Inc.'s 500
million barrel Alpine field. The village's 450 residents are
accelerating to the future on a wave of jobs and cash.

Trailing into the village with opportunity and oil dollars are
symptoms of change: health problems and concerns that villagers will
lose their ties to the land in a rising tide of wealth.

Straddling an industrial future and an ancient past, Nuiqsut is
feeling the tremors of change.

BUILDING THE FUTURE

At 6 o'clock each night last winter, a dynamite blast shook the
village.

"It's enough to shake the coffee out of my cup," village elder Abe
Simmons said, laughing.

Across the Colville River from Nuiqsut, Arco is mining gravel from the
riverbank. The evening blast loosed another layer from the frigid
quarry floor. A fleet of loaders and a team of drivers, including
Vera, worked 24 hours a day moving rock to the Alpine site, dumping
loads, raising the pad, until the rock stands at least 5 feet deep
over 97 acres.

When complete next spring, the field will sit on two gravel pads atop
500 million barrels of oil. Alpine will be an island in the delta,
connected to oil fields to the east only by a pipeline, a gleaming
silver thread suspended 6 feet above the land.

NOT FOR EVERYONE

The oil field is the first on Native land on the North Slope.

As landowners, Nuiqsut residents get benefits ranging from cash
dividends to free natural gas to snowplowing at the ice-fishing hole.

Eight miles from a half-billion barrels of oil to be pumped over 25
years, Nuiqsut residents have an opportunity for lasting wealth. More
important, villagers say, is protecting hunting and fishing and job
opportunities today for locals amid the encroaching oil fields.

"I'm a worker, always have been," said George Sielak, a burly Nuiqsut
resident who is a supervisor at the village-owned construction company.

Since graduating from Barrow High School in 1979, he has driven a
bulldozer, worked at Prudhoe Bay, sat on boards of two Native
corporations and been Nuiqsut mayor. Heading to work in his pickup one
morning in March, he was five minutes early. It was 40 below outside.
Sielak licked an ice cream cone.

A week earlier, three locals on his 17-person crew lost their jobs
when a drug test found they used marijuana. That day, three others
never came to work, something that irritates him.

He is responsible for maintaining the 10-mile ice road between the oil
field and gravel pit. In summer, this land thaws into fragile tundra.
Arctic winters allow a transportation innovation: By spraying layers
of water on the tundra, oil companies can lay down a thick ribbon of
ice, as hard as pavement and temporary as the seasons. By summer, the
road is gone.

Sielak barked orders over the citizens band radio in English and
Inupiaq. The road gets pitted by heavy trucks. To smooth the surface,
Sielak needed water. At 40 below, water is difficult to find and
averse to staying in liquid form. The construction site is a chaotic
scene of ice fog, exhaust and mechanical motion.

When Alpine is completed, Nuiqsut will have more than 100 full-time
jobs, compared with only 40 before the project. Construction started
in January with 48 Nuiqsut residents working at the development,
getting about $20 an hour. With jobs few and cash scarce, a paycheck
is welcome in Nuiqsut.

"We have to pay our bills," said Dora Nukapigak, who drives a gravel
compactor at Alpine.

Sticking with the work is not easy for all villagers. By the end of
March, the number of residents working at Alpine dropped almost in half. Many
burned out and quit after weeks of 12-hour days, Sielak said. Others lost
jobs in drug tests, said Boyd Brown, director of the gravel project
for Nuiqsut constructors. The contractor scrambled to find workers
from elsewhere.

For some, a truck-driving job is not worth the humiliation of the drug
test. Medic Dennis Johnson was collecting samples when a villager
threw a cupful of urine in his face and stalked out the door.

"Guess they'd rather stay in town," Sielak said.