Unalaska, AK – The Unalaska City Council meets this evening for its regular session.
The biggest item on the agenda is the council's decision on who will take over council member Joanna Aldridge's seat for the remainder of her term. Aldridge announced at the council's last meeting that she would be stepping down in order to spend time with her parents in Washington.
Three people have submitted letters of interest to the council: Chris Bobbitt, Roger Rowland and David Gregory. The council will pick one of the three to serve the rest of Aldridge's term, which ends in October.
Unalaska, AK – The Aleutians West Coastal Resource Service Area Board unanimously gave the go-ahead to Pacific Stevedoring's proposed cold storage dock project at a special meeting Monday afternoon, and ended its public comment period on the controversial project.
The board was looking only at the environmental aspects of PacSteve's plan, and evaluating the company's plans for environmental mitigation to offset the impact of the dock project, which would add 300 feet of dock space and a 125,000-square-foot cold storage facility on Ballyhoo Road in Dutch Harbor. The company had proposed a one-time beach cleanup project, a proposal that board Chairman Frank Kelty said was reasonable.
Unalaska, AK – Half a dozen employees of North Pacific Fuel are on strike in Unalaska following an impasse in contract negotiations with the company.
The strike began at 8 a.m. on Saturday, and about half of North Pacific's employees in Unalaska are participating, picketing the company's various facilities on the island.
The General Teamsters' Anchorage-based Local 959, which is seeking to organize the North Pacific employees, is coordinating the strike. The union led a similar strike at North Pacific a year ago, which lasted two days.
Unalaska, AK – Public safety personnel rescued a man from Captains Bay late Saturday morning after he lost control of his truck and rolled from the road down an embankment into the ocean.
The driver's name wasn't available today, and the cause of the accident is still under investigation. Officers responded at 11:40 a.m. and found the man trapped inside the partially submerged truck. They were able to pull him out before hypothermia set in, and recovered the truck.
Unalaska, AK – The Unalaska Raiders faced tough opposition this past weekend in games in Unalaska, Bethel and Anchorage.
The girls basketball team is now 4-8 and the boys are 6-6 after losing their weekend games against Bethel and the Anchorage West junior varsity team.
The girls lost to Bethel 46-37 and 56-35 in their two-game series in Unalaska. The boys were edged out by West 49-48 in Anchorage on Thursday before losing to Bethel in two games on the team's home court, 52-39 and 38-33.
Unalaska, AK – Thanks in part to booming seafood trade, Alaska's exports to other countries grew to a record high of $4 billion last year. The seafood exports themselves topped $2 billion for the first time.
Figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau show the state's exports growing 12.6 percent from 2005 to 2006. Seafood exports grew by 2.8 percent in 2006 and accounted for a full half of the state's exports for the year, in spite of a drop in sales to Japan.
Unalaska, AK – The crew of the Coast Guard cutter Akushnet, a Ketchikan-based vessel that arrived in port yesterday, spent today showing groups of Unalaska kids around their ship. The crew hosted an open house on the ship this morning and afternoon, and will be leaving port on Thursday.
This is the Akushnet's first visit to Unalaska as the Coast Guard's Queen of the Fleet. The ship received that title at a ceremony in Kodiak earlier this month, when the cutter Storis was retired and the Akushnet became the Coast Guard's oldest commissioned vessel.
Unalaska, AK – Two warehouse employees sustained minor injuries after attacking each other with a five-pound tube of frozen hamburger last Tuesday.
Both men received minor welts after hitting each other in the head with the frozen hamburger during the fight, which stemmed from an argument at the Peterkin Distributors warehouse that afternoon, according to the Department of Public Safety. Officers responded to the incident and reconciled the two parties, neither of whom pressed charges.
Unalaska, AK – This year's Bering Sea opilio crab season began last month, and it's been an unusual one so far. Crab fishermen are pulling up pots that are twice as full of opilio as they were five years ago, and market shortages have given them a much better price for their product than they had last year. But a combination of freak accidents and business decisions by seafood processors has wreaked havoc on the season. In Unalaska, KIAL's Charles Homans reports.
