In November 2011, I was in my first year working as the Web Director for KNOM Radio in Nome, Alaska, when a massive autumn storm battered the Bering Sea coastline and sent back south an ocean tanker bringing vitally needed fuel to town.
Before a second delivery attempt could be made, winter arrived in the sub-Arctic, and the ocean, as it always does, froze over. The fuel delivery was no longer possible — at least, not by traditional means. It took a Coast Guard icebreaker, the Healy, and the Russian tanker Renda, working together, to bring the fuel to ice-locked Nome a few months later.
And while the story made national headlines, poor traveling conditions meant that few journalists from Anchorage or the Lower 48 were in Nome when the lights of the two icebreakers first pierced the inky dark of our Bering Sea horizon.
KNOM’s radio newscasts were paired, online, with images of the Healy and Renda making their historic journey, cutting through the frozen ocean. When they finally made it within a quarter-mile of the shore, I accompanied a KNOM reporter out onto the sea ice and, several minutes later, became one of the only photojournalists in the United States to step aboard the Renda.
Close to sunset on Wednesday, January 18, 2012, the fuel line from the Renda (foreground) was finally completing a months-delayed delivery of heating fuel.
The ice-caked hull of the Renda.
KNOM's Matthew Smith on the sea ice directly adjacent to the Russian tanker Renda, with the U.S. Coast Guard's Healy visible to the east.
At dusk, before walking back to shore, my colleague Matthew takes a final look at the Russian tanker Renda.
I became one of the only photojournalists in the United States to step aboard the Renda.
Almost no one spoke English, so the portraits I posted on KNOM’s Facebook profile later that night of the crew had been facilitated through handshakes and smiles and simple gestures of gratitude. Through digital media, thousands of people shared in it.
People who would have otherwise only heard our story on the fuel delivery got to go one step further: they walked on the Renda’s ice-battered decks with us, met its captain face-to-face, and saw a rare sight: the skyline of a rural Alaska town as viewed from atop the frozen ocean.
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