Courtesy of City Hall

Usually when undetonated explosives are found in Unalaska, they’re remnants of World War II. But explosive materials discovered earlier this week at the wastewater treatment plant came from a different source. 

Unalaska has had numerous power outages over the last month, but the latest one isn’t related to the previous ones.

Public Utilities Director Dan Winters says yesterday’s noontime outage was caused by a gasket failure in the cooling system. The water drained out of one of the Wartsilla engines, triggering an automatic shutoff. Winters says they started another engine to pick up the dropped load while replacing the gasket.

A brief power outage struck Unalaska Thursday afternoon.

The lights went out around 12:30 and power was restored about 15 minutes later. There have been at least eight such outages in Unalaska in the last two weeks. City officials have said previously that they’ve contacted large industrial users, but they haven’t released information about what’s causing the disruptions in service.

The Fish-N-Bowl (Stephanie Joyce)

The Ounalashka Corporation is getting the ball rolling on reopening its bowling alley. OC put out a request for proposals this week, asking for individuals or businesses that might want to run the Fish-N-Bowl.

OC Operations manager Dave Gregory says it’s been closed for too long.

“It was open back in the late 80s and it was a pretty thriving little place for five or six years, and then something happened and the owner/operator just went out of business and left all the bowling equipment there.”

A recent shortage of cement has created a sticky situation for several city construction projects. Public works director Nancy Peterson says Smokey Point Concrete ran out of cement last week. They’re a subcontractor on three big projects -- the landfill’s leachate tank, the paving of Ballyhoo Road and the Unalaska Marine Center dock drainage project.

Peterson says responsibility falls on the contractors -- Alaska Mechanical, Knik Construction, and Northern Mechanical -- to keep the three projects moving forward.

A sailor who shipwrecked on Akutan last year is restarting his around-the-world journey.

According to the Whidbey News-Times, 61-year-old Rimas Meleshyus left Washington on Monday, bound for the southern tip of South America. He’s sailing a San Juan 24 -- the same kind of boat he used to cross the Gulf of Alaska last summer. That vessel ended up beached in Sarana Bay on the south side of Akutan during a storm, and after waiting nine days for a rescue, Meleshyus had to abandon it.

The city is moving forward with plans to increase its fresh water supply. At Tuesday night’s meeting, council awarded a $270,000 contract to the environmental consulting firm Shannon & Wilson to do exploratory work for new well development, and to refurbish existing wells.

Public utilities director Dan Winters explained to council that the city has been unable to meet the fish processing plants’ water demand on five separate occasions since 2005 -- although he noted that most of those times, it wasn’t because the city had actually run out of water.

The Tiglax in port on July 25, 2013. (Stephanie Joyce/KUCB)

The research vessel Tiglax travels the Aleutians all summer, supporting research in the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. The ship was in port last week, and its crew invited the public aboard for a tour celebrating the 100th anniversary of the refuge.

The federal government is cutting subsidies to the telephone company that serves Adak amid concerns about how the money is being spent. As KUCB’s Stephanie Joyce reports, that leaves the future of Adak’s phone service up in the air.

Fifteen thousand dollars. That’s about how much the Federal Communications Commission used to pay Adak Telephone annually for each phone line in the community. In 2011, the total added up to $4.2 million worth of federal subsidies for less than 400 people.