Prince William Sound faces a winter without ferry service as the Aurora is overhauled

Valdez, Cordova, Whittier and the rest of Prince William Sound face a winter with little or no ferry service while the state's aging ferry Aurora is in the shipyard. State transportation officials told lawmakers Thursday that the lasting fix is new docks that can take other ferries, and those are years from done.

"I believe right now the schedule is zero for sailings," Sen. George Rauscher, who represents Valdez, told the Senate Transportation Committee. He said there would be essentially no service between November and May, hampering school activities and tourism.

The Aurora, built in 1977, is the ferry that serves the Sound. In July, the Department of Transportation and Public Facilities said crews had found extensive wasted steel, meaning steel that has corroded and thinned, and that the ship would need an extended overhaul. The winter plan the ferry system proposed that month had the Aurora in overhaul from Oct. 1 through March 5, returning to the Sound on March 6.

Transportation Commissioner Ryan Anderson did not give a count of winter sailings. He said the region faces a longer outage this winter because of the overhaul, and that the department had pushed the start back two weeks to accommodate school events in the region.

Anderson said the department had looked at bringing the Tustumena over for a couple of runs, but not every dock in the Sound fits every state ferry. Dock projects are planned in Cordova, Tatitlek and Chenega. "We just got to get them built," Anderson said. He said some of that work is starting and will take two to three years of construction.

Once those docks are done, Anderson said, the state could send one of its newer Alaska-class ferries, the Hubbard or the Tazlina, to the Sound during outages like this one. The department is currently seeking bids to add crew quarters to the Tazlina. Anderson said that if such a ferry had crew quarters and the docks fit it, the Sound would not face this winter's outage.

Committee Chair Jesse Bjorkman raised a similar concern for Yakutat, which he said "may have had one ferry call in the last 3 years or so." Anderson said a ferry did stop in Yakutat this year on a run across the Gulf of Alaska.

Department officials said the state has more than $1 billion in active ferry projects. They include a $191 million replacement for the LeConte, backed by a $153.4 million federal grant awarded in August. Anderson said he expects the ferries that are running to be available about 99% of the time this year.

The ferry projects are part of the department's draft 2027-2030 Statewide Transportation Improvement Program. Public comment on the draft closes Oct. 29.