More ships than ever are operating in the Bering Strait and off the north coast of Alaska, but many of the nautical charts for the region haven’t been updated in more than a century. Now, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is trying to fix that. The research vessel Fairweather sets off Wednesday for a surveying trip in the Arctic.
On the back deck of the 231-foot Fairweather, Operations Officer Caryn Zacharias is showing off a 10-foot long piece of equipment that looks like a torpedo with wings.
The community development quota groups, or CDQ groups, were created in 1992 to bring impoverished Western Alaska communities into the lucrative Bering Sea fisheries. Today, the six nonprofit corporations split roughly ten percent of various fish quotas and collectively own more than $700 million in assets.
The state’s review is supposed to increase accountability. For the CDQ groups, it's familiar territory. The state is asking them to evaluate their own financial performance, and the jobs and educational opportunities they’ve provided to their member villages. They’ll have to determine whether they’ve met goals they outlined in their own, individual community development plans.
Earlier this year, it looked like Adak was going to lose jet service as part of cutbacks to the federal Essential Air Service program. It turns out they might keep it after all - at least for a little while.
For almost a decade, Alaska Airlines has been flying a Boeing 737-Combi plane to Adak twice a week. But in February, the company announced it wasn’t interested in renewing its contract after it expired on June 30. The Department of Transportation, which administers the federal subsidy program, put out a request for other bidders on the route. Only one airline replied and the DOT rejected their bid, citing high cost and lack of community support. So, in May, the bidding process reopened.
The Air Force has grounded a squadron of F-16 fighter jets in Japan after one of their pilots crashed in the North Pacific this Sunday.
The pilot was on his way to Alaska when his jet crashed about 250 miles off the Japanese coast. He safely ejected from the plane and spent six hours in the water before being picked up by a commercial cargo ship transiting the Aleutians. He was transferred to the Coast Guard cutter Monro and then dropped off in Cold Bay on Tuesday.
For months, community leaders have been trying to get information about whether Unalaska’s child welfare office will reopen. Now, the Office of Children’s Services says it is working on a possible solution.
Technically, OCS has an office in Unalaska - there’s a sign on the door and a number in the local phone book - but the office has been empty since 2009. In 2010, the state stopped looking for someone to fill the vacancy. All reports of child abuse and neglect in the Aleutian and Pribilof Islands are sent to social workers in Homer and Wasilla.
The building that houses Unalaskans Against Sexual Assault and Family Violence is about to grow.
USAFV executive director M. Lynn Crane presented a plan to build an addition at a city council meeting Tuesday night. Council approved her request to use $50,000 in leftover city grants to help pay for the project.
“We want to build off the back of the building as far as we can and still meet code for setbacks and all of those things," Crane says. "That will become the new living room and dining room area along with a new and much more functional utility room.”
Unalaska’s finance director is one of five finalists for the Soldotna city manager job. Tonya Miller has been finance director since 2007. She relocated to Unalaska from Georgia, where she worked as a county-level finance director. A press release from the city of Soldotna says she’ll be the first to be interviewed for the job next Monday. Miller is on vacation and couldn’t be reached for comment.
Two sailors headed from Honolulu to Unalaska were rescued by the Coast Guard Sunday night. Lydia and Bill Ludgate have been sailing around the Pacific for three years, trying to retrace Captain Cook’s voyages. The rudder on their 50-foot sloop broke about 500 miles south of Unalaska.
“If the wind was in the right direction, we could sail north, but if the wind was in the wrong direction, we just had to sit," Bill says. "51༠40N is etched onto my memory cells because we sat on 51༠40 for about five days, waiting for the wind to change, just bobbing up and down.”
At a glance, a new billboard near Shell Oil’s corporate headquarters in Houston looks like any Shell ad. It features Shell’s name and logo, and their trademarked ad slogan “let’s go.” It shows two polar bears lazing on an iceberg.
Superimposed on the bears is a new Shell slogan: “You can’t run your SUV on ‘cute.’”
Those words are definitely not Shell’s, and neither is the billboard. It belongs to Greenpeace.
