Fishing boats sit dry-docked near the Lummi Fishing Supply Marine and Outdoor Warehouse in the Prince William Marina. The restaurants and bars are empty. It's cold inside buildings. Even the hospital is chilly. Heating oil costs too much.

“I wear long-johns and sweaters to work,” said Heather Gora, a nurse and part-time bartender. “At home, we only use the heat when absolutely necessary and my kids all sleep in sleeping bags, and in some cases when we watch TV we slip on our bags to keep warm.”

Cordova has always been known as a bustling fishing community full of idealists and hard-working, independent-minded Alaskans. But the community is declining, about 12.5 percent since 1990, according to the state Department of Labor.

Brigitta Windisch-Cole, an economist with the state Department of Labor, attributed the downturn in the fishing industry to lower fish runs and the deterioration of market pricing.

Several years after the Exxon Valdez spilled 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into the waters of Prince William Sound, the herring runs started to wane and eventually disappeared.

Today there is no herring fishery, and as a result, there is little money for heating oil.

Heating oil is $4 a gallon in Cordova. Some residents said they can only afford to buy the oil 50 gallons at a time.

The rising cost of oil, combined with a cold winter and dwindling financial coffers, is hitting home: Cordova, much like other rural communities in Alaska, is in a crisis.

Additionally the rising cost of oil, now more than $100 a barrel, will likely push heating oil prices even higher next winter.

Heating oil used this year was purchased wholesale last year. For communities off the road system, fuel is shipped in the summer and stored for wintertime use.

“I only turn the heat on in the morning for a few hours in one spot in my house,” said Joy Landaluce, editor of the Cordova Times newspaper. “Our house is too big to afford heating all of it so we only heat the upstairs, where I write my stories for a couple hours each day.”

Fisherman Louis Landaluce sits beside the woodstove in his house on a hill overlooking the Cordova Harbor and carves, waiting for salmon season. This is the same house used as a studio by painter Eustice Zeigler. Landaluce would like to remodel the inside, but has a son in college and is short on cash for extra projects.

The Landaluces also have a bed and breakfast that was formerly a senior center, and later, the office for the Cordova Times newspaper. It sits without heat also. Closed up, curtains and blinds drawn, a musty two-bedroom clapboard house with a living room, waiting for cheery visitors to brighten up its interior.

In an effort to cut back costs due to the local economy, the Cordova Time is now run out of the editor's home.

“There is no traffic here in the winter, so what's the use in heating it?” Joy Landaluce asks rhetorically.

The fisherman?s memorial statue overlooks the Cordova boat harbor has a rail with memorial plaques of those who have died and those who were lost at sea. Photos/Rob Stapleton/AJOC

Fishermen Mike Maxwell and his lifelong friend Kory Blake are hopeful that they will receive monetary compensation from the Exxon case, currently being debated in the federal Supreme Court.

“The loss of the herring, that drove me off,” Blake said. “I picked up after the spill, moved to Wasilla, and raised by family in a different place. I didn't want my boys growing up around here. It really changed from when Mike and I were boys.”

Blake recently moved back to Cordova, but laments that it's not the same.

Steve Smith wanders in to the restaurant and sits down. The waitress asks, “You want the same thing?” Smith replies, “Yep, sure.” He sits waiting for a bowl of pickled octopus.

This is a town that lives and dies over fishing, or at least it did.

“That spill changed a way of life here,” said Smith, a fisherman who holds several different fishing permits in the Prince William Sound. And that's something that no amount of money will ever replace, he said.

Money is the main topic around town; not who has it, but fishermen with claims against Exxon wonder if they are ever going to see any settlement.

As fishermen file into the Alaska Hotel cafe for breakfast the next morning, a middle-aged woman walks in the door and smiles at Landaluce, blurting out, “I sure am glad to be living in Cordova!”

“Last week the IRS took all my money out of my bank account,” the woman said. “I couldn't afford to buy heating oil, so my pipes froze up. A couple of the boys from the electric company came over here, thawed out my pipes, put 50 gallons of oil in my tank. Then they dropped off a load of wood in the driveway for my stove. If it weren't for those boys, I'd be a frozen stiff at home.

“I am so glad I'm in Cordova. I just love the people here.”