For eleven hours, Eadia Hamberlin drove north on a gravel track. Assailed with dust, tossed about by the road, she admired the mountains of the North Slope, then skirted the swampy tundra with boredom. Finally, she arrived at Prudhoe Bay, an oil field located on the edge of the Arctic, in the far north of Alaska. This 1er July, at a place called Deadhorse, she walks her dog, under the sun, between the prefabricated cabins and the derricks, before delivering her cargo… of diesel. This is the paradox: you have to transport fuel from the south to run the oil base at Prudhoe Baye, which, in 1967, was the largest discovery of black gold in the United States.
For eight hundred kilometres, Eadia Hamberlin has skirted the Trans-Alaska pipeline linking Prudhoe Bay to the port of Valdez since 1977 – which has the advantage of never being caught in the ice – on the Pacific. But the pipe works one way and everything has to be brought to the base by truck. Here, there are hardly any women and we don’t stay there. “Welcome to Deadhorse, zero inhabitantsproclaims Norman Piispanen, veteran of the base. Even if there are up to 5,000 people, we don’t live there. There is no residential property, no school, no restaurant. Everything is industrial, and it’s voluntary. » The whole is managed by the oil companies that exploit the deposit, currently the Texas company Hilcorp. The firms are in the sights of regulatory authorities and environmentalists: the place is therefore clean, without the car bodies and garbage that litter the coastal villages of Alaska. In front of flares and pipelines, caribou graze.
The subcontractors are at the service of the companies and their employees, housed in cabins. We do not speak of “hotels”, but of “camps”, not really wrongly. At the “Deadhorse Camp”, not only are meals and showers shared, but the toilets are installed in an onion row, with a plastic curtain as a closure. Everyone comes and goes. “I’ve been doing three weeks here, three weeks in Oregon, and have been for three years. I have a house to pay off and when I am home I can actually see my wife”explains Glenn Lemaire, oil subcontractor at the wheel of his pick-up.
Under the solstice sun, Prudhoe Bay looks like a seaside resort. “It’s nice, but when the wind is blowing, when it’s -50°C, it’s less so”, tempers Norman Piispanen, in this solitary space where the sun disappears for fifty-four days, around Christmas. On the spot, we stick together. “People help each other. They know that you’re here to work hard and not to make life harder for others.” summarizes Molly Fae Nash, 30, who, with her husband, holds the “Deadhorse Camp”. At the only grocery store in the area, the proprietor finds that business is hardly flourishing. Along with all the clients, he castigates President Joe Biden. On this republican land, this seems normal. But it is even more so because of the fight led by the Democratic administration against hydrocarbons.
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