A complex legal battle has been brewing between a popular medevac insurance provider and the state’s largest medevac company for the past year. While Guardian Flight won’t talk about the case, the insurer, Apollo MT, says it can’t afford to keep quiet.
Apollo MT took an unusual step this summer to tell its customers just how much money this private dispute could cost them. In June, some 2,400 Unalaska residents with Apollo MT insurance got a letter in their mailboxes. The letter was from the insurer, and it asked customers to, “please request all other carriers prior to Guardian Flight being utilized."
U.S. Senator Mark Begich announced Tuesday that he and his staff are heading out on a community tour of Alaska this month to discuss economic growth and job creation.
Although the Senator will only visit a handful of places, he’s sending staff to almost 60 communities, including remote villages like Kiana, Angoon, and St. Michael. But notably absent from the Senator’s tour are any Aleutian communities.
A year after the Coast Guard seized the stateless fishing vessel Bangun Perkasa and brought it back to Unalaska, the agency is in pursuit of another suspected pirate vessel.
Details are sparse, but during a press conference yesterday, Coast Guard Commandant Robert Papp said the cutter Rush had intercepted a vessel suspected of high seas drift netting. A United Nations moratorium on high seas drift netting is enforced by member states, including the U.S. According to the Associated Press, the Coast Guard found 40 tons of illegal fish on board the vessel.
Hallidie Wilt set a new running course record in the Bobby Johnson Summer Bay Classic on Sunday. The former UAA runner finished the 13.1-mile course in 1:28:51. That’s an average pace of 6 minutes and 45 seconds per mile.
Joe Echevarria set the previous record in 1996 with a time of 1:31:04.
Sixteen people ran, biked and walked this year’s race.
Greenpeace’s research vessel Esperanza pulled back into Unalaska this weekend. According to spokesman Joe Smyth, they’re here to resupply and switch out crew members.
Greenpeace staged a small protest in front of Shell’s Noble Discoverer drill ship yesterday and posted the photos to their Flickr feed. According to a federal injunction, Greenpeace can’t get within a kilometer of Shell’s drill ships or 500 meters of Shell’s other support vessels. The Coast Guard says they’ve had no reports of the group violating that order.
A mapping tool that could help emergency response in the Arctic launched last week.
The Environmental Response Management Application or ERMA is an interactive map, with data layers that can be switched on and off. The various layers have information like offshore lease areas, sea ice extent and critical animal habitats. With all that information consolidated on a single map, the hope is that responders can act more efficiently and effectively in the event of an oil spill or maritime disaster.
Shell still hasn’t received final permits for its Arctic drilling plans, but the company is starting to send vessels north anyways.
Two of the company’s support vessels – the Aiviq and the Fennica – left Unalaska early this week for the Chukchi Sea. The icebreaker Tor Viking is expected to join them in the next few days. Together, the vessels will start prepping the drill site for the Noble Discoverer’s arrival.
“This is what planning for success looks like and this is what efficiency looks like," says Shell spokesperson Curtis Smith. "And these are days, of course, in a shortened season already that we want to use as efficiently as possible.”
PenAir is cutting back on service to remote communities in southwest Alaska. The airline announced Wednesday that going forward, it will focus on flights to hub communities, like Unalaska and Dillingham.
The largest community that the announcement will affect is Akutan. PenAir President Danny Seybert sent a letter to the Department of Transportation Wednesday notifying them that the airline no longer wants to fly to the community. PenAir’s Akutan service has been financed by federal subsidies through the DOT’s Essential Air Service program. PenAir’s EAS contract for Akutan isn’t set to expire until April 2013, but Seybert says the airline wants to cut that route as soon as September 1. That’s when Akutan’s new airstrip, on uninhabited Akun Island, is set to open.
The novelist Gore Vidal passed away Tuesday at 86. Although Vidal is better known for his later historical works, the author started his writing career with a mystery novel about the Aleutians.
Williwaw is set aboard a supply freighter transiting the islands during World War II. The book was based on Vidal’s own experiences as the 19-year-old first mate of a similar ship. According to a 2003 PBS interview, Vidal wrote most of Williwaw during a trip between Chernofski and Unalaska. He finished it while recovering from frostbite in a military hospital.
