An emergency shelter set up for the 2012 Alaska Shield drill. / KUCB

It's been 50 years since the Good Friday earthquake rocked Alaska. It rattled some nerves in Unalaska, but not much else. The epicenter was hundreds of miles away.

Still, there's no telling when or where the next big quake might strike. That's why Unalaska is preparing for an imaginary earthquake and tsunami, in this year's Alaska Shield disaster exercise.

Local schools will evacuate on Thursday, and an emergency shelter will open Friday morning at the Parks, Culture, and Recreation Center.

Ever since the Interior Department turned down a request to build a road through a federal wildlife refuge in December, the village of King Cove has been lobbying hard to keep the proposal alive.

Now, a group of King Cove residents and tribal officials have brought their fight to Washington. They’ve traveled to the nation’s capital so they can attend a Senate appropriations meeting on Wednesday.

An ammonia leak cleared out part of the UniSea complex late Saturday night.

Deputy police chief Mike Holman says a cracked valve appears to have caused the leak at the G2 plant, shortly after 1 a.m. Sunday morning.

He says UniSea workers were being evacuated from the building by the time public safety officers in the area noticed what was going on. Those officers and others helped evacuate the rest of the workers and had others shelter in place.

Unalaska is a step closer to adding rules for construction camps to city code after Thursday’s planning commission meeting.

The commission approved four of five proposed changes to the zoning code, also known as Title 8. Those changes will go have to go before city council for final approval.

One set of changes creates set guidelines for where construction camps can go in town and how they should be set up. Right now, city code doesn’t contain detailed language about camps.

A 20-year-old man is facing felony charges in back-to-back assaults at the UniSea bunkhouses this week -- including an attempted sexual assault.

Police allege that Jose Sedona got into a fight on Tuesday, striking a man in the face. Sedona was a UniSea employee. Company security reported the fight to police.

Public safety director Jamie Sunderland says officers judged Sedona to be sober and took him into custody.

Blowing snow plastered Unalaska on Wednesday. (Annie Ngo/KUCB)

Unalaskans woke up to wet snow blowing sideways Wednesday morning -- and an island-wide cell phone outage.

GCI spokesman David Morris says that’s because the company’s satellite dish on Haystack Hill is getting plastered with snow.

"And even though we have deicers and heaters, it’s just not keeping up with the conditions," Morris says. "So what we’re doing is, we’ve repeatedly dispatched someone to go clean the dish out. And now I think we have a person just stationed there. That’s all they’re doing."

Unalaska’s planning commission will hold a public hearing Thursday on changes to the city zoning code, also known as Title 8.

Big issues up for discussion include construction camps and planned housing developments.

Planning Director Erin Reinders says right now, city code makes little mention of construction camps. That means the planning commission has to address them on a case-by-case basis.

City planning director Erin Reinders at KUCB's studios. /Credit: Lauren Rosenthal

Unalaskans know their community is on the verge of change. Increasing oil development in the Arctic could bring more industry to town. And that's something city planners want to be on top of far before it happens. They're preparing for a new comprehensive study this May on what residents want their city to look like -- what kinds of developments should be allowed, and where.

A member of the Coast Guard Marine Safety Detachment in Unalaska has passed away in Anchorage.

Petty Officer Michal Marciniak died at Alaska Regional Hospital Tuesday morning while receiving treatment for a serious illness.

Marciniak had fallen ill Monday morning and was medevacked to Cold Bay on a Coast Guard helicopter. A commercial medevac brought him to Alaska Regional’s emergency room in critical condition.