Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 110
Private contractors, state and municipal crews worked long days last week to restore power, remove downed trees and clear truckloads of mud and debris that flowed down the hillside above Ketchikan. Crews focused on reopening streets and drains in case more heavy rain falls on the community. "We want to approach it methodically and make sure we do it safely ... there is a phasing-in of people moving back to their homes," City of Ketchikan Public Works Director Seth Brakke said Aug. 30. "There's...
A landslide tore down a slope about a mile north of downtown Ketchikan, killing one person and injuring three on Sunday. The landslide hit around 4 p.m., and a mandatory evacuation order remained in place Monday for homes on several streets in the slide area near the waterfront. A dozen people stayed at an emergency shelter established at Ketchikan High School on Sunday night, emergency officials said. Others stayed with family or friends. Schools were closed Monday, which would have been the...
The Alaska Department of Transportation installed a ridgetop weather station near 11-Mile earlier this month. The station will allow scientists and DOT officials to further monitor the area affected by the November 2023 landslides. Standing 18 feet tall, the structure will report data such as air temperature, precipitation, wind speed and direction, and snow depth. Notably, it is the only snow depth monitor on the island other than the airport weather station, according to Pat Dryer, an...
Alaska communications and aviation entities, together with federal and state officials, convened in a summit in Yakutat led by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski to collaborate on solutions to reduce weather-related travel delays and boost aviation safety in the state. “We have 130 weather recording stations in Alaska and at any given time 50% are partially or entirely out of service,” Murkowski said on Aug. 15. The senator, a third-generation Alaskan born and raised in Ketchikan, and later Wrangell, is out to resolve this issue, which has resulted in...
A team of experts has been conducting research in Wrangell this week, hoping to pinpoint the cause of last November's landslides. As a part of its visit, the group gave a well-attended presentation on Saturday evening at the Nolan Center to keep the community informed on their findings. The team's research is funded by a National Science Foundation rapid response research grant, known as RAPID. Led by Margaret Darrow, a professor in geological engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks,...
So, you want to see bears at the Anan Wildlife Observatory. But maybe you couldn't get one of the limited number of permits, or you live out of town and can't make the trip, or maybe you are a little more afraid of them than you care to admit. But now, thanks to the U.S. Forest Service, explore.org and 14 Wrangell high school students in the T3 Program, anyone worldwide can view Anan's fish-crazed black and brown bears. Last week, after months of preparation, planning and prototyping, the two...
They may be out of sight to the general public but they are never out of mind for the U.S. Forest Service. The agency maintains 35 mountaintop repeater towers within the Tongass National Forest to provide radio coverage for their field crews and first responders. A contractor is installing new repeater stations at five sites this summer in the Wrangell and Petersburg ranger districts, part of an ongoing effort to switch out older units with newer models. Of particular importance to Wrangell, a...
Photographer Matt McDonald had lived on Puget Sound for years but had never seen a whale, so he was elated when he spotted a giant marine mammal just off Seattle’s waterfront one evening. The excitement was short-lived. As McDonald tracked the whale in his camera’s viewfinder, a Washington state ferry that dwarfed the animal came into the frame. The next morning, he saw on the news that the humpback whale had died in the collision he witnessed. “I still remember the moment when they crossed paths and my heart just started sinking like, ‘Oh m...
Over the past decade, landslides have cost Southeast Alaska communities in both death and destruction - 11 deaths and tens of millions of dollars in property and infrastructure damage. Now communities around Southeast are reckoning with a future in which more destructive landslides are likely, as climate change fuels the extreme rainfall events and storms that scientists say may lead to increasingly powerful events in the future. The most recent major landslide, on Nov. 20 at 11-Mile Zimovia...
From remote weather stations to laser imaging to autonomous drones, the state and borough are working together to deploy cutting-edge monitoring technology at the 11-Mile landslide site. LiDAR maps that were created before and after the slide will help geologists study potential landslide risks on the island. LiDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, is a laser-based imaging method that creates detailed, three-dimensional maps of the Earth’s surface. LiDAR instruments consist of a laser, a scanner and a specialized GPS receiver to e...
The strong storm system that hit Wrangell on Nov. 20 struck across Southeast Alaska, dumping snow in the north, rain in the south and heavy winds throughout. A landslide closed parts of North Tongass Highway in Ketchikan on Nov. 20 and Alaska Power & Telephone reported that several slides and snapped poles took out power on Prince of Wales Island, including at Hydaburg, Thorne Bay, the Klawock-Hollis Highway and between Craig and Klawock. A road was also washed out in Coffman Cove. The Klawock School District opened up its gym for people stuck...
The Forest Service’s Anan Bay cabin, which was destroyed by a fallen tree in February, will be one of the first seven cabins built — or in this case, rebuilt — as part of the federally funded Alaska cabins project. Reconstruction on the cabin is scheduled for the summer of 2024. The updated Anan Bay cabin will be in the same location, but with an altered design. “We had an engineer go out and determine that the cabin does need to be rebuilt, but the foundation can be used,” explained Dawn Collinsworth, Alaska Region deputy director for recre...
Amanda Arra saw about 50 feet of her Juneau backyard consumed by the Mendenhall River in just a few hours as the waters rose to a record flood level Saturday afternoon, Aug. 5. By evening, as a nearby home fell into the river, she feared she was going to lose hers as well. Her home was still intact at midday Sunday, but about a quarter of the structure was hanging over the eroded riverbank as friends carried her belongings outside the house. Arra had abandoned the home the night before and said...
It wasn’t a downpour but it was enough to raise the water level at both reservoirs and ease fears of shortages, Public Works Director Tom Wetor said of the rainfall Sunday and Monday. “Overall, I’m feeling pretty good,” he said Monday morning. With just a few weeks left of the heaviest water demand for salmon processing, and with the traditionally rainy weather of early fall approaching, Wetor thinks Wrangell will make it through the summer. “We’re in pretty good shape right now.” The borough last week urged residents to conserve water after a...
The Department of Fish and Game has announced that 74,800 “treaty” king salmon (non-hatchery fish) will be available for taking in the summer commercial troll season’s first opening, which started Saturday. The department released summer king salmon harvest numbers on June 22. In total, 106,800 kings remain on the table following the spring fishery harvest, the agency said, and the troll fleet will be able to target 70% of those in the summer’s first opener. The fleet hooked 24,700 fish in the winter opener and an additional 14,100 kings i...
A fishing adventure turned tragic for a family when disaster struck one of the two Sitka boats they chartered over the Memorial Day weekend, leaving three people dead and two missing despite a search over hundreds of square miles of ocean. The tragedy tore the Tyau family apart: Two sisters and one of their husbands are dead, while the other’s partner and the boat captain remain missing a week after the 30-foot aluminum boat was found partially submerged off an island near Sitka. Authorities on May 29 suspended their search after more than 2...
Drifting ash from a volcanic eruption in the Russian Far East forced Alaska Airlines to cancel more than 100 flights last week, including its northbound and southbound jets through Wrangell and Petersburg last Thursday and Friday. Flights throughout Alaska had largely returned to normal by Saturday, other than a couple of missed flights to Sitka that day as a portion of the ash cloud hung around the community. Although a “very large area” of gas left over from the ash cloud still hovered over the eastern Gulf of Alaska near Sitka by Sat...
Juneau saw record-breaking levels of rainfall in 2022, but National Weather Service measurements and the observations of local amateur meteorologist Bill Messmer suggest that Wrangell was spared the worst of the deluge. Juneau's 2022 precipitation totaled 88.31 inches according to measurements taken at the airport. This was three inches wetter than the previous record set in 1991. The National Weather Service hasn't recorded official stats for Wrangell precipitation in years, leaving the measuri...
Dec. 7, 1922 A local business change took place Tuesday when F.E. Gingrass retired from the Wrangell Machine Shop, having sold his interest to W.R. Nevill. Mr. Gingrass had been with the business for the past 11 years. In April, 1920, Bert Harvie, of Petersburg, became a partner in the business and since that time the business has been conducted under the name Gingrass & Harvie. The style of the new firm will be Harvie & Nevill. Mr. Nevill came north last February to visit his father and brother, and liked the country so well that he decided...
The National Transportation Safety Board is calling for new federal regulations to safeguard Ketchikan flightseeing tours following years of deadly crashes, several of them involving cruise ship passengers and bad weather. Seven flightseeing crashes in and around Ketchikan since 2007 have killed 31 people and seriously injured 13 others despite a longstanding voluntary safety program signed by flight companies, according to a 20-page report the NTSB released Nov. 29. The agency wants the Federal Aviation Administration to replace the voluntary...
Though you might not find four calling birds, three french hens, two turtle doves and a partridge in a pear tree in the rainforest ecosystems of the Tongass, there can be no doubt that counting birds is a quintessential Christmas activity. On Dec. 17, Wrangell’s avian enthusiasts will participate in Audubon’s 123rd annual Christmas Bird Count. Over 20 countries and thousands of volunteers contribute to this early-winter bird census, which runs from Dec. 14 to Jan. 5 yearly. Each community’s bird count is conducted on a single calendar day w...
When the remnants of Typhoon Merbok were barreling toward western Alaska to unleash what turned out to be the region’s strongest storm in more than half a century, meteorologists knew what was coming. What they could not predict was the exact level and location of flooding – devastation that prompted a federal disaster declaration by President Joe Biden and a whirlwind Alaska tour by Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Deanne Criswell. “The large-scale weather models nailed this storm, days in advance. The storm surge model...
The remnants of a massive Pacific typhoon that battered a thousand-mile stretch of Western Alaska dissipated Sunday morning, with floodwaters dropping and communities assessing damage from one of the worst storms on record. The storm left a trail of wreckage across coastal Alaska, with flooding, telecommunications outages and damage to buildings and infrastructure including roads, docks, seawalls and village runways. As of Monday morning, there were no reports of deaths, serious injuries or people missing, said National Weather Service...
It is ironic and absurd to the point of tears. We are told by the 2016 Tongass National Forest Plan, the Biden administration through Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and, of course, by local and national environmental groups that there can be no timber harvest on 9.4 million acres of inventoried roadless areas in the Tongass. Why? To “protect” fish and wildlife, and to save tourists from seeing clearcuts. As it turns out, we need to petition the Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Forest Service to act decisively to pro...
After several years of research, Sitka’s new online landslide-warning system is now live. But the site — which uses data from the National Weather Service alongside historical data to determine the level of landslide risk in Sitka — is only a start to the landslide research that remains to be done, said a scientist on the project. “It’s a conclusion but it’s also kind of a beginning,” said Jacyn Schmidt, geoscience coordinator at the Sitka Sound Science Center. Educating Sitkans on how to react to the possibility of landslides, and building...
