On a normal winter day on St. Paul, an island in the Bering Sea some 300 miles off the Alaskan coast, the community would be humming with activity. At the Trident Seafood crab processing plant, the diesel engines of commercial crab boats would be gurgling, and lifts would be running nonstop, transferring thousands of pounds of snow crab into the plant.
“Those sounds are a reminder that money is coming in,” St. Paul’s city manager, Phil Zavadil, said in February from his office in city hall.
