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For the past year, Sea Quester, a seaweed farming company based in Juneau, has been making progress growing kelp. Among its creations is a kelp burger — sales topped 500 at the Southeast Alaska State Fair in Haines in July. But its main focus is improving on ways to farm sea kelp for more than just burgers, and scalability is the key. Sea Quester is one of 15 companies — seven in Southeast — awarded grants totaling more than $1.27 million from the Alaska Mariculture Cluster Joint Innovation Program through the Alaska Fisheries Devel...
A federal judge has upheld decisions by President Joe Biden and the Department of the Interior that temporarily suspended work needed to open the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling. In a 74-page order published Aug. 7, U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason ruled in favor of the federal government and against the state of Alaska, its state-owned development corporation and several other plaintiffs. The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, the development bank, is the sole remaining oil...
A landmark environmental court ruling in Montana on Aug. 14 has striking implications for Alaska, particularly with a vow by the organization behind it to bring a similar case here. It won’t be the first time they’ve done it, but this time there’s a lot more science — and precedent. The Montana case is being heralded as a groundbreaking victory because it is the first time a judge has found a governmental duty to protect citizens from climate change. The case, brought by 16 youths ranging in age from 5 to 22, found state agencies in Montana...
A custom homebuilder in Anchorage said it can now take a full year to complete a house, twice as long as they once did, because workers are hard to find amid a labor shortage that’s predicted to get worse. There aren’t enough framers to erect walls, so concrete foundations can sit untouched for months on end in a “painful waiting game,” Bill Taylor said. Electricians, plumbers, sheetrockers, roofers and others are in high demand, too, so labor costs are higher. “It’s been going on aggressively since COVID,” said Taylor, who owns Colony Builde...
Alaska will receive $44 million in federal aid to replace fish culverts By Jeff McMurray, Associated Press The U.S. Department of Transportation on Aug. 16 announced nearly $200 million in federal grants to upgrade culverts — the tunnels that carry streams beneath roads but can be deadly to fish that get stuck trying to pass through. More than $44 million of the money will go to Alaska projects, including replacement culverts under roadways on Prince of Wales Island and in Metlakatla and Yakutat. About one-quarter of the money is going to t...
An insidious, invasive crab is multiplying in numbers on the southern shores of Annette Island. As of Friday, Aug. 11, Metlakatla Indian Community teams have recovered 1,622 invasive green crabs from Tamgas Harbor, a large, open bight in the southern end of the island, as well as from Muskeg Beach just outside and west of Tamgas. The invasive green crab is a destructive predator that can change and degrade habitat and threaten native species. The crab adapts well to most ecosystems, and has boomed on the coast of Oregon, Washington and British...
WAILUKU, Hawaii — In the hours before a wildfire engulfed the town of Lahaina, Maui County officials failed to activate sirens that would have warned the entire population of the approaching flames and instead relied on a series of sometimes confusing social media posts that reached a much smaller audience. Power and cellular outages for residents further stymied communication efforts. Radio reports were scarce, some survivors reported, even as the blaze began to consume the town. Roadblocks then forced fleeing drivers onto one narrow d...
The destruction came as a glacial dam burst in Alaska’s capital city on Aug. 5, swelling the Mendenhall River to an unprecedented degree. The bursting of such snow-and-ice dams is a phenomenon called a jökuhlaup, and while it’s relatively little-known in the U.S., researchers say such glacial floods could threaten about 15 million people around the world. “We sat down there and were just watching it, and all of a sudden trees started to fall in,” said Amanda Arra, whose house still hung precariously over the riverbank two days after the floodin...
Thousands of tourists spill onto a boardwalk in Alaska’s capital city every day from cruise ships towering over downtown. Vendors hawk shoreside trips and rows of buses stand ready to whisk visitors away, with many headed for the area’s crown jewel: the Mendenhall Glacier. The glacier gets swarmed by sightseeing helicopters and attracts visitors by kayak, canoe and foot. So many come to see the glacier and Juneau’s other wonders that the city’s immediate concern is how to manage them all as a record number are expected this year. Some residen...
As Alaska grapples with a shortage of teachers and high turnover rates, a regional nonprofit is recruiting Alaska Native educators to a new statewide program designed to support and retain them. Amber Frommherz, of Sealaska Heritage Institute, said the new initiative, called the Community of Practice program, is a place for educators from around the state to support each other. “The goal is really to increase their job satisfaction,” said Frommherz, who directs SHI’s education program. “It’s going to be some professional development with this...
A conditional-use permit for a $150 million development proposed on nearly three acres of Juneau’s downtown waterfront received approval Aug. 7 from the city planning commission. The action follows the commission’s vote in early July to approve another permit related to the same development for construction of a cruise ship dock located along Gastineau Channel just off Egan Drive as the thoroughfare nears downtown. The two projects, proposed by Huna Totem Corp., are part of the Alaska Native corporation’s large vision for its downtown water...
Environmental groups have asked a federal appeals court to overturn the Biden administration’s approval of exports from the proposed $44 billion project to sell North Slope natural gas. The Sierra Club and Center for Biological Diversity filed a petition with the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia on Friday, Aug. 11, seeking to reverse the Department of Energy approval granted in April to the state-led project that would send North Slope gas to Asian markets. The environmental groups argue that the massive project would unleash t...
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...
Southeast Alaska commercial seine fishermen are blazing past pink salmon catch estimates that the Alaska Department of Fish and Game predicted for the summer season. Fish and Game in May forecast that seine fishermen would harvest about 19 million pink salmon across Southeast this summer. Bo Meredith, who manages Ketchikan-area commercial fisheries for Fish and Game, said on Aug. 4 that seiners already have likely caught 19 million since the season opened in early July, with more than a month of pink season still to come. The Southeast seine...
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has announced a second opportunity for commercial trollers to catch chinook salmon in Southeast after a smaller-than-average troll fleet took about 85,000 chinook during an initial opener July 1-12. Troll fishermen can target an additional 10,000 chinook during a one-day fishery that will open from 12:01 a.m. through 11:59 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 11, the department announced on Monday, Aug. 7. The department originally had scheduled the one-day opening for Saturday, but a forecast of high winds pushed...
The Sitka city assembly has given the go-ahead to a plan for building a boat haul-out and shipyard at the Gary Paxton Industrial Park by late 2024. The option calls for a 150-ton boat lift, haul-out piers, washdown pad and an EPA-certified wastewater treatment system. The haul-out would be located next to the old Alaska Pulp Corp. utility dock, with an adjacent work yard for about 20 vessels. “I think that this will be a crucial piece of infrastructure that is worth investing in,” Assembly Member Kevin Mosher said at the July 27 meeting. “Ev...
A record number of people believed to be homeless have died on Anchorage streets in the past seven months, and the count could increase before the year is out, according to police data. The death count stood at 29 on July 28, surpassing the previous record of 24 set for all of last year, the Anchorage Daily News reported. Of this year’s count, more than half of the people died after the city closed its mass shelter at the Sullivan Arena on May 1, according to police incident reports. “That’s very unfortunate,” Alexis Johnson, the city’s...
The state has paid $350,000 to settle a four-year-old lawsuit that found Gov. Mike Dunleavy and his former chief of staff personally liable for illegally firing a state attorney. The settlement with Elizabeth Bakalar, of Juneau, ends a series of state and federal lawsuits triggered when Dunleavy and then-chief of staff Tuckerman Babcock asked state employees to submit resignation letters during the transition from the administration of Gov. Bill Walker in December 2018. In 2021, a federal judge concluded that the process was “an u...
Alaska Natives in certain rural areas of the state have the nation’s highest death rates from suicide and domestic violence and some of the highest rates of accidental deaths, while Asians and Latinos in the state have some of the nation’s lowest rates for deaths from a wide variety of conditions like heart disease and respiratory disorders, according to a new study. The study, published Thursday, Aug. 3, in The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest medical journals, is a sweeping review of health disparities across the nation, as shown in vario...
The state has formally asked a federal judge to decide whether the Bureau of Indian Affairs may create the legal equivalent of reservation land in Alaska on behalf of Native tribes. On Aug. 1, the state filed for summary judgment in its ongoing lawsuit against the federal government and the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. The lawsuit involves a small downtown lot in Juneau. So far, only two tribes in Alaska have placed land into trust with the BIA — in Craig in 2017 and in Juneau this year — after the fed...
After Donald Trump was indicted on four criminal charges, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said the former president “played a key role in instigating” the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Murkowski is an outspoken Trump critic and was one of seven Republican senators who voted in 2021 to convict the impeached former president for inciting an insurrection. The senator said in an Aug. 2 statement that her 2021 vote was “based on clear evidence that he attempted to overturn the 2020 election after losing it.” ”Additional evidence presented...
The math that more people are leaving Alaska than moving to the state, along with the aging of the adult population that remains, has put Alaska’s largest city and the state at risk of squandering economic opportunities, according to a three-year outlook released Aug. 2 by the nonprofit Anchorage Economic Development Corp. “Anchorage and Alaska are witnessing a weird combination of big economic opportunities that are mostly a sure thing, combined with economic threats that could lead to decades of stagnation and decline,” Bill Popp, the organ...
A new online tool will allow survivors to check the status of their sexual assault kits, Alaska’s Department of Public Safety announced last month. The department developed a tracker so survivors can stay up to date on their case in “the least intrusive and traumatic way possible.” A sexual assault kit, known as a “rape kit,” contains materials a medical professional can use to collect DNA samples or other evidence after a crime. A rape kit can be a tool to convict perpetrators of sexual violence if survivors choose to report their assault....
A new $120,000 program that puts retired state troopers in uniform on Alaska ferries is seeing results: no incidents and an appreciative crew, which has long been tasked with overseeing the occasional unruly passenger. “We’re here to make sure that people enjoy their trips, but don’t interfere with other people enjoying their trips,” said retired trooper Chad Goeden, who was in uniform and stood out among passengers in casual clothes on the Columbia during the ferry’s three-day passage from Bellingham, Washington, to Ketchikan on July 14-1...
Elders and adults with disabilities will have more opportunities to get care at home or in a home-like setting under a bill that became state law when Gov. Mike Dunleavy signed it on July 29. The measure, Senate Bill 57, serves two broad categories of Alaskans who might otherwise have to move into assisted-care facilities: disabled adults, including youth who have aged out of the foster system, and elders. For disabled adults, the bill authorizes a system of adult host homes serving one or two people, a category into which foster parents’ h...