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U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officer James Nelson was honored at the 2024 Law Enforcement and Investigations Director's Awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, for his actions responding to the deadly landslide in Wrangell last November. Nelson was presented with the Award for Bravery, Valor or Heroic Act. "It was well earned and he's very deserving of the award," said Patrol Captain Bill Elsner, Nelson's supervisor out of Ketchikan. Nelson, who will have been with the Forest...
Fire Chief Jordan Buness grew up in a volunteer fire department family. "It's something I knew that I always wanted to do," he said of serving as chief. "I wanted to earn my way into that," taking every training class he could over the past 20 years. He got his chance when his father, Tim Buness, retired on June 5 after 35 years as chief. Jordan's grandfather, Gordon, was the first of the three Buness generations to lead the Wrangell Volunteer Fire Department. "My dad ingrained that (community...
Aug. 7, 1924 Frederick H. Meisnest, vice president and treasurer of the Alaska Shellfish Co., is in Wrangell for a week’s visit. This company was recently established in Wrangell by James. M. Bell for the purpose of canning crabs. Bell has experienced many annoying delays in getting the cannery started, but everything is going fine now and the prospects are bright that the work will be successfully continued through the season. The company is using the trawling system in its crab fishing, which is used by the Japanese and the British deep-sea f...
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...
The Petersburg-based seiner Pamela Rae took on water and rolled over in Anita Bay the morning of June 25, but the five people on board all made it safely off the vessel. “When we first got there, the vessel was already underwater and appeared to be sitting on bottom,” said Jordan Buness, chief of the Wrangell Volunteer Fire Department, which responded to the call. “It was probably in less than 15 feet of water.” Anita Bay, off the east side of Etolin Island, is about 16 miles south of downtown Wrangell. “We found that everybody was already off...
Kids of all ages will have a chance to check out some big rigs at the popular Touch-a-Truck event, from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday, June 23, at the parking lot by Volunteer Park. Attendees will get to see many kinds of work vehicles, including fire trucks, police cars, bulldozers, dump trucks and more. This is the seventh such event held in Wrangell, with one year staged as a parade due to COVID restrictions. While it’s normally held on a Saturday, Parks and Recreation Coordinator Devyn Johnson said she wanted kids to be able to come to this event a...
After a six-hour search, divers recovered the body of a woman who died in a boat collision between a 20-foot Hewescraft aluminum skiff and a 58-foot commercial fishing vessel in the Wrangell Narrows near the mouth of Blind Slough on Wednesday morning, June 5. An Alaska State Troopers spokesman on Friday identified the woman as Susan Paul, 73, of California. A second individual, thrown from the skiff into the water, was rescued by a good Samaritan on the scene, according to a U.S. Coast Guard news release. The man was taken to the Petersburg...
The chamber of commerce at its annual awards dinner last weekend honored several members of the community for their service, including the fire department and emergency medical services crew, municipal electric line crew and borough employees for their response to the deadly Nov. 20 landslide that hit Wrangell. “Nowhere was the ‘I can help’ spirit more evident than in November of last year when a tragic landslide befell our community. For weeks, volunteers and first responders showed just what an amazing place Wrangell is,” said Carolin...
The South Tongass Volunteer Fire Department station in Ketchikan caught fire early morning April 9, damaging multiple fire and EMS response vehicles. When the Wrangell Fire Department heard about the damages, they responded quickly by lending an ambulance to Ketchikan, sending it out on a barge later that same day. The fire started at 2 a.m. April 9, according to information from the Ketchikan Gateway Borough, and was under control by 3:49 a.m. and extinguished by 4:30 a.m. No one was injured in the fire. The Ketchikan department lost a 20-year...
Wrangell firefighters will join the 33rd annual stairclimb competition in Seattle next month to raise money for the fight against leukemia and lymphoma. Clay Hammer, Dustin Johnson and Steve Prysunka are taking part in the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Firefighter Stairclimb on Sunday, March 10. It’s the world’s largest such event where the climbers breathe through their airpacks. The contest will be held at Seattle’s tallest building, the Columbia Center. All 2,000 participants are career, volunteer or retired firefighters from all over th...
Alaska's senior senator, Lisa Murkowski, told community leaders she will push for federal funding to bolster monitoring efforts of hillsides out the road. "What we need to have is greater monitoring and greater data that will help inform. That is something that I'm committed to working on," she said at a meeting with borough officials on Dec. 20 in Wrangell. "How do you give people that certainty that your home sitting on the beach where you thought you were always safe, and now you're looking...
Doug Shoultz Wrangell Bible Baptist Church Nedra and I started our second church in southern Indiana in 1987. We were blessed with an old country church building on the outskirts of town with a history that goes back to the very early 1900s. Its construction consisted of lots of wood with a concrete and block foundation. It was built with singing in mind. It also had a rich history of withstanding storms and the many floods that came with the storms. That history included the great flood of 1913 and the shelter offered by this church building...
The borough on Dec. 6 announced the suspension of the search for Derek Heller, 12, missing since a Nov. 20 landslide took out his family’s home at 11-Mile Zimovia Highway. “The decision to end the active search comes after 15 days of tireless and exhaustive efforts by the Wrangell Volunteer Fire Department Search and Rescue teams,” the borough’s announcement said. “The untiring efforts to locate 12-year-old Derek Heller extended to all accessible areas above and into the intertidal zone,” the borough’s statement said. Wrangell Volunteer Fir...
Therapy dogs Cupid and Tia calmly waited with their handlers Margaret Griffo and Terry Yeomans, greeting arrivals before class in the high school courtyard on Friday, Dec. 8, after starting their morning with the coffee crowd at the Stikine Inn and Restaurant. The dogs had arrived in Wrangell the day before, coming to town from their Anchorage-area homes for a few days to help people coping with the tragedy of the deadly landslide and the stress of the search and uncertainty, the loss and the...
Response to the deadly landslide continues, with extensive clearing work to remove debris from along the highway to increase safety and with fundraising for families affected by the disaster, particularly the Heller and Florschutz families that lost loved ones. More than $43,000 from 342 donations had been raised in a GoFundMe campaign for the two families as of Monday, Dec. 4. Almost $20,000 had been raised in another account to help families who were displaced or whose lives were disrupted by...
The borough on Wednesday announced the suspension of the search for Derek Heller, 12, missing since a Nov. 20 landslide took out his family’s home at 11-Mile Zimovia Highway. Searchers had recovered the bodies of his parents, Timothy and Beth, and his sisters, Mara, 16, and Kara, 11, last week. Searchers also had found the body of the other landslide victim, Otto Florschutz, 65. “The decision to end the active search comes after 15 days of tireless and exhaustive efforts by the Wrangell Volunteer Fire Department Search and Rescue teams,” the bo...
"It could have been a whole lot worse," Scott Brown said of running his 27-foot Tollycraft on to a rock in Circle Bay on the south side of Woronkofski Island last week. No one was hurt, the boat didn't take on water, and the only damage was a bent prop, Brown said July 12, the day after the mishap. Brown was piloting the boat, the Shawna Lea, named for his wife, around the southwest corner of Hat Island in the bay, "not paying attention to the depth," he said. It was about 10 a.m. July 11, soon...
Volunteer firefighters and paramedics may be eligible for a small property tax break next year. Though the volunteers won’t save much on their taxes, borough officials see the change as a expression of appreciation for the essential work firefighters and paramedics perform. At its May 23 meeting, the borough assembly unanimously approved the first reading of an ordinance that would offer a $10,000 property tax exemption to qualified firefighters and emergency medical services personnel. Before the change becomes official, the borough must h...
Feb. 22, 1923 The Wrangell High School basketball team, under the supervision of Superintendent W. L. Gross, will leave on the steamship Northwestern for a series of games in Puget Sound. The boys are very glad of course to have an opportunity to play teams in Seattle and other cities. However, basketball is not the sole object of the journey. It is to be an educational trip, and basketball will be the means by which the trip will be financed. Some of the educational phases of the trip will be a day in the courts and a day looking in on the...
The borough will use the results of an eight-day public survey of users of its downtown harbor floats to boost the competitiveness of its federal grant application to rebuild the facilities, which officials said are in desperate need of repair. The survey closed Monday and it will take a while to tabulate the results, but officials believe it will help make the borough’s case for as much as $25 million in federal funds. After completing an $11.5 million repair project at Shoemaker Bay Harbor in 2019, the borough does not have the cash on h...
Lifelong resident Harvey Gross came to the end of the trail and met death on Nov. 30, 2022, at the Wrangell SEARHC medical hospital. Born in Wrangell on April 7, 1929, to his Tlingit mother Bessie (Nickerson) Gross and Father William (Bill) Gross Sr., Harvey was the youngest of five children. Like so many who were poor during the Great Depression, he described living those years as "the chicken in the summer and the feathers in the winter." About 1935, the family took up homesteading on the...
Oct. 5, 1922 Better Homes Week is to be observed throughout America Oct. 9-14. Twenty-two governors are taking part in the movement. Gov. Scott C. Bone, who early gave his support to the movement, made the following statement today: “Alaska has approximately 55,000 homemakers. It has less than 10,000 homeowners. The Better Homes in America Movement was inaugurated for the avowed purpose of strengthening in the mind of people the desire to own their own homes and spread knowledge of how to improve them. This purpose is so lofty and manifestly i...
My voice is an echo. So many people write to the Sentinel to express their thanks and appreciation for the great work that the folks at the Wrangell Volunteer Fire Department and especially the EMT corps do for this community. I don’t have any better words than what has already been expressed but I want to make sure that everyone involved knows how much I appreciate the rapid response to my call, the good care and the kindness you all displayed. And a huge thank you to the police department and the medical staff at the emergency room. The c...
Devyn Johnson watches as her son, Nolan, 5, steps down from the cab of a Hitachi backhoe during the Touch a Truck event at Volunteer Park last Saturday. Johnson began the event a few years ago, getting the idea from her sister, who takes her children to a similar event in eastern Washington state. "I figured, my husband is on the fire department and does construction, so my kids have the opportunity to check those vehicles out all the time," she said. "We know kids in town who don't have that...
June 1, 1922 Five dollars will be paid to any person who furnishes information leading to conviction of anyone fishing in the city dam or the waters above the dam. Fishing or taking fish from the city dam has been prohibited and the parents of minor children will be held responsible for the acts of their children in the violation of this municipal law. Evidence given will be held strictly confidential and unless absolutely necessary the informant need not be present at the trial. “The city council desires to protect the health of every p...