ocal grocery and department stores have shelves lined with thousands of items, the great majority of which didn’t originate in Alaska. So where did those potato chips come from? What size was the barge that brought those vacuum cleaners here? How many bicycles came in the latest shipment?

While the general public may not spend much time pondering those questions, the reality of what it takes to bring goods to the state is truly a testament to Alaska’s robust tug and barge industry, which serves a critical role in the state’s commerce.

“We like to think that we’re kind of a shining star here, enabling commerce for a broader state,” says Michael O’Shea, senior business development director for Cook Inlet Tug & Barge. “If the maritime industry doesn’t work, the state’s wheels won’t turn. Without us, the truck drivers don’t work, the longshoremen don’t work. Think about it: the stuff doesn’t get on the shelves at Fred Meyer from cars.”

Approximately fifty tugboat and barge companies operate more than 150 vessels throughout Alaska’s 5,500 miles of inland waterways, more than any other state. State economist Neal Fried says the tug and barge industry is tricky to quantify because its importance isn’t necessarily reflected in the jobs that are directly created within the industry but rather the jobs that are created as a result of the work the tug and barge industry accomplishes. He points out that the 2018 Revised Annual Employment and Wages Report shows 1,222 jobs were created in the water transportation industry and yielded approximately $109 million in total earnings, resulting in an annual wage of $89,376 per employee.

American Waterways Operators is the national trade association for the nation’s tugboat, towboat, and barge industry. It published a 2017 study, Economic Contribution of the US Tugboat, Towboat, and Barge Industry, that shows that there were 2,040 jobs associated with the industry in 2014 in Alaska. Many of those jobs (890) are indirect employment, with 640 jobs acting as direct employment positions within Alaska’s barge and tug industry. That same American Waterways Operators study says the industry yielded approximately $208 million in revenue in 2014.

Lucas Stotts rarely has a moment to relax from the responsibilities he faces as the Port of Nome Harbormaster. “I’m on the radio 24 hours a day, dispatching vessels in and out of the facility,” says Stotts. Because Nome has a limited number of deep docks it can maintain, there is a growing waitlist of people reaching out to Stotts months in advance to book space at the port. Amidst high traffic and limited space, Stotts’ main duty is to make sure the port serves its function.

“A large part of my job is finding out what operations are going on in a given day and how they are all going to mesh together to keep the facility going, the traffic flowing, and the traffic coming in and out,” says Stotts. “Nome is the transshipping hub for the region, so a lot of shipping comes into our dock and has to get lifted onto the barges out on the causeway at our deeper draft docks with 22 or 23 feet of water depth. Then that stuff will get trucked inland down to our lower industrial pad where it will get loaded again onto landing crafts or smaller barges to get delivered up the region or to other places that don’t have the infrastructure.”

Business has accelerated in Nome over the last decade. “We kind of blew up in 2012, 2013, and 2014. It just got crazy, so we had to hire more people because there was just too much to do,” says Joy Baker, who worked as Nome’s Harbormaster from 1997 until 2013, when Stotts took the helm as Baker transitioned to her current role of Port Director. Baker used to manage the port by herself with the help of some Public Works team members, though that changed when it became clear the Port of Nome was going to play a larger role in growing the region.

“There was a really big push for development in the region, so a lot of stuff started coming through us,” says Baker. “There was a lot of freight coming through with construction supplies for airports, hospitals, roads, schools, houses, tanks, and heavy equipment. Research took a big jump, and now recently cruise ships are taking a big jump. The whole thing has grown immensely in the last nine or ten years, and we’re actually scrambling to keep up.”

Baker is busy working on the Arctic Deep Draft Port Expansion, a project spearheaded by a partnership between the City of Nome and the US Army Corps of Engineers–Alaska District with a focus on evaluating all aspects of a Port of Nome expansion. “That’s a big, key thing that I spend a lot of my time on,” she says.

A typical day for Stotts centers around various deliveries arriving in Nome. In addition to groceries, many of which are canned or nonperishable goods, the port also serves as a hub for fuel, freight, and gravel. “Any construction projects—building equipment, airport runways, erosion control—absolutely any materials that can’t be flown in are going to come through Nome on barges,” says Stotts.

Nome has a modest fishing fleet of twenty-four vessels and hosts various other vessels that visit from around the region, but the port’s calling card is still receiving barge shipments, an important part of the region that sparks genuine excitement—and curiosity—from its citizens.

“When the landing crafts finally hit the beach and drop the bow and rolls one of the only trucks into town, it’s really a big deal for those communities,” says Stotts. “Everybody is chomping at the bit to get their new stuff out because it’s really the lifeblood of these communities. With the cost of airfreight being so high, barging is really the only reliable and semi-affordable way to get stuff into Western Alaska. It’s really the only thing making it possible for the region to develop.”

While barges are designed to carry large shipments via shipping containers, a tugboat’s purpose is to help large vessels navigate through the water. “A tug is a motorized working boat, whereas a barge is more like a big floating bathtub with a concrete deck,” says Stotts. Tugs carry large winches with an attached wire capable of connecting to barges through chain bridles that hang below a barge’s bow. The connection gives a tug the ability to maneuver the barge by pushing or pulling until the barge reaches its final destination. Tugs are especially impactful once a vessel approaches shore, as they typically hug the hip of the vessel and manually power it toward its destination. Even when tugs allow barges to float away from the tow in the middle of the ocean, the wire connecting the two vessels still serves a purpose. “As they ride up and down the waves and cut through the water, that weight of the wire acts like a big shock absorber between the barge and the tug,” Stotts says.

Tugs don’t just help vessels and barges reach their destination; they also provide a safety component that cannot be understated. “In Cook Inlet, with the high tides, the vast current, and of course the icy conditions in the wintertime, people can seriously get killed if they’re not doing it correctly,” says O’Shea. “We’re having a real tough ice year in Cook Inlet this year. A lot of people haven’t seen ice this tough.”

Although O’Shea and Cook Inlet Tug & Barge President Jeff Johnson caution that tugs aren’t designed to break ice, many Alaska tugs are equipped with extra steel plates that act as armor and protect the hull when they encounter icy conditions.

“On the big ships, when they come in, they not only have the ship’s captain and the engineers, they also carry what’s called a ship’s pilot, which is somebody who specializes in the area or specializes in docking big ships in the region,” says Johnson. “When we go and link up to a ship with our tugboat, we really work at the direction of the ship’s pilot, who is in control of maneuvering the vessel. He directs us through radio communications if he wants us to push here or pull there to make sure the docking is safely done.”

Cook Inlet Tug & Barge is a marine transportation company and member of the Saltchuk family of companies. It employs sixty-five people and carries a fleet of eleven tugs and five barges that help out with harbor services and fuel distribution in and around the Port of Alaska and Cook Inlet, Seward, Southeast, Western Alaska, and the Aleutian Islands.

The company focuses on three segments of the maritime industry: harbor services, petroleum services, and shallow water operations. The majority of its harbor services are provided in Southcentral. “We have three tractor tugs based in the Port of Alaska, and we provide all of the ship assist and ice escort services in Cook Inlet for ships coming here,” says Johnson. “That’s three tugs fully crewed 24/7 that are ready to work in Cook Inlet.”

Cook Inlet Tug & Barge does the same in Seward on a more seasonal basis with a smaller tug that helps ship pilots navigate in and out of the harbor. It also assists ships with mooring lines and conducting tie jobs, in addition to providing shipyard support work for vessels in Seward.

“We have two tugs and two barges in the petroleum division today,” says Johnson. “In our field division, or petroleum division, we tow tank barges with petroleum products for our sister company, Delta Western. We transit anywhere from San Francisco to Haines to Dutch Harbor and even further north up into the Bering Sea seasonally. We have a pretty broad operational area for petroleum services.”

The third area of the industry Cook Inlet Tug & Barge focuses on is shallow water operations. It deploys five tugs that were built specifically to operate in shallow waters in Western Alaska and along the Arctic Coast. “We have operations based in Prudhoe Bay during the ice-free maritime season up there in support of construction, oil and gas, and government work as well,” notes Johnson. “We have some boats that work in the construction and oil and gas businesses throughout Western Alaska as well, working anywhere from Kotzebue to the Yukon River.”

For years, an ordinary shipping season in Nome lasted from early June through the end of October. This has changed in recent years, with longer shoulder seasons allowing vessels to travel through Nome even earlier. “This last year, we had a Coast Guard [vessel] in, and I want to say it was May 23,” says Stotts. “Our three docks were actually ice-free, and Norton Sound was ice-free, since the middle of April or even earlier. We’re certainly seeing a trend of vessels showing up earlier. We have more research vessels wanting to show up earlier for this upcoming season, and the Coast Guard is talking about coming in mid-May if the ice conditions are good.”

Stotts has noticed the same trends at the end of the season. “We used to never really see vessels into November, but now we’re getting vessels into the first several weeks of the month,” he says. “This year, we had a research vessel, the Sikuliaq, that did a crew transfer at our dock in late November. There was floating ice out there, but the docks were physically open.”

These seasonal trends have extended into the fishing industry. “With the fishing activity changing and more of the Bering Sea fishing fleet out of Dutch Harbor fishing further north, almost just to the west of Nome for cod and pollock, those vessels are starting to call on Nome later in the season,” says Stotts.

The transportation industry has adjusted for many years to changing conditions in ice and temperature throughout Alaska and is capable and willing of serving Alaskans no matter what challenges the future may hold.