Did you know that?
While NPR-4 was created in 1923, there was no effort made to explore the huge reserve for oil or gas until World War II. By then our Navy had established a small research facility near Point Barrow. Associated exploratory drilling led to the discovery of natural gas in 1949 and the south Barrow Gas Field began its development. Gas was used to heat such Federal Facilities as the hospital, the BIA School, and the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory, but we local people were not permitted to connect to gas to heat our homes.
It was a long, frustrating 12 year struggle to get permission to hook our homes in Barrow to gas mains that crisscrossed Barrow through our back yards. Although it sounds incredible today, the Navy was absolutely implacable (siqquqsima) in its refusal to let us use our own natural gas to heat our homes, and it took us twelve full years to get approval for us to connect to gas. It took a special congressional authorization in 1963 to sell us our gas for $0.50 per million cubic feet, a very high price at the time, one intended to force us to help amortize (akiililaaq) the Navy’s gas field development costs.
Our leaders then had to fight for that. I remember my dad used to turn off our heat at times during the winter months to conserve the stove oil for colder nights.