Bikini Atoll closed to tourists due to high cost of fuel
Updated
Rising International fuel prices continue to wreak havoc in the Pacific region with the announcement today that Bikini Atoll will be closing it's doors to tourists. Jack Niedenthal, Tourism Operations Manager for the Bikini Atoll Local Government says there have been a number of contributing factors but that the main reason is the cost of fuel. He says the operating expenses of the local airline - Air Marshalls - have become too expensive. The last visitors will leave the Atoll on June 11th.
Presenter: Barbara Heggen
Speaker: Jack Niedenthal, Tourism Operations Manager for the Bikini Atoll Local Government
NIEDENTHAL: I think it's a good decision, it was a very business generated decision because we had to look at a lot of different factors at this point. We have our domestic airline Air Marshalls having problems because they only have one airplane. Their reputation has been really damaged by the last seven or eight months as we've only had one week of divers up on Bikini, and it's been really hard for us financially to keep that going, as we had to keep paying our people up there to run the operation. And the other factor that's really weighing in very heavily, especially for next year is the cost of fuel to run the power plant on Bikini. Fuel here now is 33 cents a kilowatt hour, we're hearing it's going to go up to possibly 60 cents. Bikini's even more expensive than that, and now the Council is going to have to decide whether or not they want to keep that operation going. It's such a high cost to them, as that part of the budget also competes with a lot of our social programs like scholarships and medical plans and a lot of construction projects that we do for our people here. And also energy costs here in Majuro and on Kili(?) islands. So there's a lot of programs competing for those dollars. People have to understand that for us this whole entire business is run by the people of Bikini, by their local government, there's no big corporation involved with us, and what we will do each year from the proceeds from this operation is we buy food for our community, about 100-thousand dollars worth of food each year because our people are living in places where they can't live off the land, so we would buy food for them. Now we can't do that any more, and the other issue for us is we're really proud of this dive program and what we've been able to do, I mean it's been a world-class operation for the last 13 years. And now for us to have to say well we can't do this anymore, mostly in fact really all because of factors that are completely out of our control, the airline and the high cost of fuel. So it's been really sad for us, I spent yesterday with the leaders talking about this decision. They've left the dive program decisions pretty much up to me all along and after a long discussion, and very sad discussions we've decided that this was the best thing to do at this point.
HEGGEN: So how are people going to cope without the proceeds of tourism?
NIEDENTHAL: Well let me tell you that it is not just us, the Bikinians that are suffering right now because of high energy costs and issues like the Air Marshalls Islands problems. We had two children die on Kili (?) because at that point the Air Marshalls didn't have any airlines operating, so we tried to medi-vac one of the girls by boat and she wound up dying on the way here, and we had another nine month old baby die that I'm sure could have easily been saved had we had an airplane. So there are much larger issues than just tourism here. We really want the airline to get back on track, but the government has huge energy costs and obligations and most people here, there are a lot of people now on Majuro who are having the power shut off because they can't pay their bills. It's the sort of thing where sometimes people say man this is going to be pretty bad in a couple of months, but here in the Marshall Islands we're looking at this right now. And it's a very serious problem. And I just, it's hard to see where the end is, I don't know how much worse it can get, the price of rice is about to double so it's been really hard here.
