The Carl E. Moses small boat harbor has been open for business since December, and it’s already gone through two public dedications.
But when the community gathered this weekend for the third dedication, they weren’t celebrating the harbor, so much as its namesake.
Former representative Carl E. Moses flew in from Sand Point just for the ceremony on Saturday. It was the first time he’d had been back to Unalaska since he lost his re-election in 2006.
By December, Sand Point should be able to close the book on a five-year cleanup project at the abandoned quarry. That’s when the last few barrels of hazardous waste will be put on a boat, and shipped out of town, says city manager Paul Day.
"And when I say hazardous, it wasn’t nuclear — it’s just stuff that we can’t dispose of locally," Day says. "We can’t burn it. So it had to be shipped out of Sand Point for disposal."
After 15 years of development, Atka is set to dedicate its hydropower plant this fall. Now, another Aleutian community is trying to follow its example. Adak is in the first stages of turning its abundant water supply into energy.
At a meeting Thursday night, city council started to sift through its options for paying off massive upgrades of Unalaska’s utilities.
The city will overhaul its water, sewer, and solid waste facilities by 2016. Mike Hubbard from Financial Engineering Company presented the results of a study on those projects, and how the city will cover the cost of building and running them.
A moderate-sized earthquake occurred near Unalaska early this morning.
The 4.0-magnitude earthquake happened on the Pacific side of the island, nearly 40 miles from town. It struck at around 3am, and occurred at a depth of 21 miles below the earth’s surface.
And just down the Aleutian Chain, another 4.3-magnitude four earthquake hit about 15 miles from Atka. That earthquake occurred just after midnight.
City council will meet tonight to hear a presentation on the city’s utilities upgrades, and their cost to consumers.
Unalaska’s water, sewer, and solid waste facilities are all scheduled for construction and improvements over the next few years. The city contracted the Financial Engineering Company to study the ways Unalaska can pay for the work without substantial rate increases. The Financial Engineering Company considered several approaches, which include increasing sales and property taxes. Mike Hubbard will present the study’s findings to council, and they’ll start discussing the city’s options.
A remote volcano in the western Aleutians has started rumbling.
An earthquake swarm at Little Sitkin started around 7pm on Wednesday and picked up this morning, prompting the Alaska Volcano Observatory to put the volcano on watch. So far, no eruptive activity has been detected.
Rick Wessels is a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, and he says the earthquakes have been striking just few miles below the volcano. He says that while the quakes have been hitting at regular intervals, they haven’t been very powerful.
The Coast Guard medevaced a crew member from Shell’s Noble Discoverer drill ship in the Norton Sound Wednesday morning. The Noble Discoverer was about 70 miles off the coast of Nome when they called the Coast Guard for help around 4 a.m.
The Noble Discoverer just left Unalaska on Saturday, and it’s on its way to Shell’s drilling prospects in the Chukchi Sea.
The Noble Discoverer reported that a 59-year-old man on their crew was suffering from an irregular heartbeat. The Coast Guard deployed an MH-65 Dolphin helicopter crew, attached to the cutter Alex Haley, to meet the Noble Discoverer at about 8 a.m. The Dolphin helicopter is participating in the Coast Guard’s Arctic Shield initiative. That program has ramped up the agency's presence in the Far North in response to increased industrial activity.
The Bering Sea pollock fleet is on track to have a record-low year with chum bycatch.
As of August 28, the fleet had taken 8,600 chum salmon. That’s a welcome turnaround after last year, when nearly 200,000 chum were caught incidentally. The high bycatch rate in 2011 triggered voluntary fishing closures across the Bering Sea.
For years, vessels have participated in the rolling hotspot closure program, which shuts down areas of the ocean to trawling when bycatch is known to be high. Many boats also use excluders that allow salmon to swim free from fishing nets. But while these efforts help mitigate bycatch, they can’t explain why this year is so much cleaner than the previous one.
