Under the Needle: The Bering Sea's town of saviors

It's reflex, a form of muscle memory applied citywide.

The city of Unalaska, most often called Dutch Harbor, used it when the Seattle-based fish processor Galaxy exploded in 2002, and two years later, when the Malaysian freighter Selendang Ayu lost power, ran aground and split in two.

On the continent's remote Aleutian tail, Dutch Harbor is the first and often only option when something goes wrong on the Bering Sea.

"You're in this position when you are 800 miles from a hospital," said Mayor Shirley Marquardt. "This community is not like your normal Alaskan community. People come out of the woodwork to help."

And, she noted wryly, locals have had plenty of practice. Last Sunday, Dutch seamlessly absorbed the 42 survivors of another Seattle-based fishing vessel, the Alaska Ranger, when it lost rudder control and sank in the Bering Sea, killing four, probably five, crew members.

Locals received the call early in the morning after the Coast Guard responded to the trawler's mayday. Marquardt, who has lived in Dutch Harbor 28 years, said volunteers know their jobs.

"Everybody gets the same call," said Marquardt, who also works for Samson Tug & Barge, which, like much of the fishing fleet, operates between Seattle and Dutch.

"One person does the housing, another gets the bags of supplies. Some of those people will have lost everything on them so we try to take care of their needs. Warm socks, phone cards, things like that. We go from there."

Marquardt said locals remain deeply affected by every disaster at sea, even though the link between Dutch and Seattle isn't as strong as it once was. (Rough around the edges, it once was called the worst neighborhood in Ballard because of a shared population of fishermen.)

Life in Dutch, a town of 4,200 on a nearly treeless, windswept island, still centers on the fishing industry

"We take these things like the Ranger to heart," the mayor said. "It hits so close to home. It's terribly, terribly sad, and everyone in some way has a connection to these boats. Some of these people have been coming up here 30 years."

And for some, it's very new.

United Methodist Pastor Dan Wilcox arrived in Dutch last summer after serving a congregation near York, Pa. Wilcox was familiar with Alaska -- his father was a pastor in Fairbanks when he was a boy -- but he hadn't spent much time in Unalaska before deciding to run the church there.

As a volunteer Coast Guard chaplain, Wilcox, too, got the call following the rescue. He said he was surprised how quickly the company that owns the Ranger responded to the rescued crew.

"Often that's the role of the church," he said.

But he's still new to Dutch, after all. And fishing-boat crews are a pretty independent lot. Wilcox said he was impressed how everyone seemed well practiced in responding to such a tragedy.

Marquardt said it's the nature of the town and of the people who live there.

A person new to Dutch asked the other day if it ever gets easier to deal with the loss of another fishing boat. It never gets easy, she said, but it does get familiar.