The remote island of St. Paul lost its radio weather service Tuesday. Dave Snyder, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Anchorage, says technicians aren’t sure why the signal stopped broadcasting.
Usually, the FM station plays weather and ice forecasts from the National Weather Service, along with special alerts for severe storms. Crab fishermen use that information when they’re fishing off St. Paul and St. George.
Walk down Unalaska’s beaches enough times, and you’re likely to find a scrap of World War II memorabilia. Most of it is harmless -- spent shells, or rusty steel. But some of it is unexploded ordnance, which can grow unstable as the years go by.
This month, the Ounalashka Corporation ended up their own potentially dangerous piece of WWII history. The ordnance was actually a donation from a well-meaning UniSea employee. Corporation staff didn’t know what to do with it, so they handed it off to Dave Gregory. He’s the operations manager.
The Alaska state legislature passed the one of the smallest capital budgets in recent years before closing the session on Sunday. Unalaska secured more than $7 million, but some other communities in the region came up empty-handed.
Unalaska's water and wastewater treatment projects each received a little over $3 million, and in a last-minute addition to the House version of the budget, the city also secured $1 million to purchase a fourth engine for the powerhouse. City manager Chris Hladick says that’s not as much as the city had hoped.
“Our original request was $5 million, but the total cost of the project is $7 million. So that leaves us with about $6 million we’ve got to figure out how to finance," Hladick says.
Unalaska’s largest seafood processor has selected a future president and CEO. Tom Enlow will take over Terry Shaff’s job at UniSea at an unspecified future date.
Enlow is currently a vice president for the company, but until last month he managed the hospitality division of Unisea, including the Grand Aleutian Hotel. He says the switch will allow him to get a better feel for the seafood processing operations.
A missile-detecting radar array on the remote Aleutian island of Shemya has been spared from sequestration.
Facing half a billion dollars in budget cuts, Reuters reports the Air Force decided earlier this year to reduce operating time for the system in order to save roughly $5 million a year. But last week, General William Shelton announced a reversal of that plan, citing concerns over North Korea.
Every spring, Unalaska prepares to do battle with the national bird.
Eagles become territorial when they nest, and that sometimes leads to attacks on unsuspecting pedestrians.
This year, the city tried to preempt the bird blitz by destroying the nest of a particularly combative pair, but as KUCB’s Stephanie Joyce reports, the eagles weren’t so easily thwarted.
City council got a first look at upcoming capital projects and funding commitments at this week's meeting.
The Capital and Major Maintenance Plan compiles the large-scale projects the city will have to complete over the next five years. In 2014, city manager Chris Hladick said, the city will tackle $31 million in capital projects. That includes replacing Summer Bay bridge and purchasing a fourth engine for the powerhouse.
City council changed course on a rock stabilization contract last night, voting to give the contract to Advanced Blasting instead of putting it out to bid.
Council discussed the project in a closed-door executive session, which lasted more than an hour. When council resumed their regular meeting, councilor Dennis Robinson immediately moved to approve a change order with Advanced Blasting.
Advanced Blasting had been contracted to blast the wastewater treatment plant site, and get it ready for construction. But rock slides at the worksite threatened to cause delays. To get the project back on schedule, the city contracted an engineer to design a stabilization system.
ConocoPhillips won’t be drilling in the Alaskan Arctic in 2014, the company announced Wednesday. The announcement follows on the heels of Shell’s decision to cancel its drilling season this year, and a report from the Department of the Interior calling for industry cooperation in developing Arctic drilling standards.
ConocoPhillips said in a statement that because of regulatory uncertainty it would “not be prudent at this time to make the significant monetary commitments needed to preserve the option to drill in 2014.”
The company has 98 exploratory leases in the Chukchi Sea, and had been planning to drill one or two wells next summer with a jack-up rig specifically designed for the Arctic. In the statement, ConocoPhillips says it will reevaluate its options once the requirements for drilling in the Alaskan offshore are clearer.
Statoil had previously announced that it has no plans to drill in the Arctic before 2015, so ConocoPhillips' announcement leaves Shell as the only company that hasn’t nixed drilling next year.
