Unalaska has a new fire chief. Twenty-year department veteran Zac Schasteen will take over the job starting Monday.
He’s been filling in as acting chief since November, when former fire chief Abner Hoage left to take the same job in Ketchikan.
But Schasteen has been with the department for most of his life, starting as a 16-year-old volunteer fire cadet and going on to be an EMT, firefighter and police officer.
"It’s been my passion since I was a kid," he says. "I’ve always really enjoyed public service. I just like it."
For the next four years, Shell's Arctic drill rigs will have a home in Unalaska.
The Alaska Department of Natural Resources has issued permits for the Noble Discoverer and Polar Pioneer rigs to occupy state-owned lands in Wide Bay. That area was recommended by Unalaska's port director and marine pilots.
Faced with a multi-billion dollar deficit, Alaska’s Legislature is looking to cut back everywhere they can. Unalaska’s state senator of two decades, Lyman Hoffman, is working on those cuts as part of the Senate Finance Committee.
As he tells KUCB's Annie Ropeik in this segment, he expects Alaska could be climbing back out of the budget crunch for at least a decade to come -- whether or not oil prices rebound.
Dillingham-based public radio station KDLG covers a rural area the size of Ohio. (Courtesy: KDLG)
Public radio and TV in Alaska could lose $2.5 million next year if a proposed state budget cut goes through.
It would be a small reduction compared to the overall deficit legislators need to close.
But it would eliminate more than half of the funding public media gets from the state.
As lawmakers try to spare towns with only one source for broadcast information, KUCB's Annie Ropeik reports that distinction might not be so easy to make.
World language students from the Unalaska City School brought home a pile of gold medals from the state declamation competition in Anchorage last month. They were one of the only delegations from a rural area, and for many, the event was a first-time experience.
Sophomore Mia Magalong and junior Onya Enkbat, who is an ESL student, each won first place in their level for Spanish poetry. In this segment, Magalong and Enkbat tell us more about the ups and downs of learning a foreign language in Unalaska, and share some of their winning recitation.
Take a trek across the Western Aleutian island of Kiska, and you're likely to stumble across some ghostly remnants of World War II.
Thousands of Japanese troops occupied the uninhabited island from June 1942 to July 1943, starting just after the bombing of Dutch Harbor. They dug in through months of heavy American air raids, and left behind everything from shipwrecks and submarine hulls, to dishes and diaries.
The state is once again looking to move the Wildlife Trooper patrol vessel Stimson from Unalaska to Kodiak. And this year, the change seems poised to go through.
Officials in Unalaska fought hard to hang on to the troopers’ biggest vessel when the move was on the table a year ago. But this time around, city manager Chris Hladick says they’ve had to reconsider their priorities.
"I just don’t see us, with this budget climate, being able to save everything," Hladick says.
