The Coast Guard medevaced a crew member from Shell’s Noble Discoverer drill ship in the Norton Sound Wednesday morning. The Noble Discoverer was about 70 miles off the coast of Nome when they called the Coast Guard for help around 4 a.m.
The Noble Discoverer just left Unalaska on Saturday, and it’s on its way to Shell’s drilling prospects in the Chukchi Sea.
The Noble Discoverer reported that a 59-year-old man on their crew was suffering from an irregular heartbeat. The Coast Guard deployed an MH-65 Dolphin helicopter crew, attached to the cutter Alex Haley, to meet the Noble Discoverer at about 8 a.m. The Dolphin helicopter is participating in the Coast Guard’s Arctic Shield initiative. That program has ramped up the agency's presence in the Far North in response to increased industrial activity.
The Bering Sea pollock fleet is on track to have a record-low year with chum bycatch.
As of August 28, the fleet had taken 8,600 chum salmon. That’s a welcome turnaround after last year, when nearly 200,000 chum were caught incidentally. The high bycatch rate in 2011 triggered voluntary fishing closures across the Bering Sea.
For years, vessels have participated in the rolling hotspot closure program, which shuts down areas of the ocean to trawling when bycatch is known to be high. Many boats also use excluders that allow salmon to swim free from fishing nets. But while these efforts help mitigate bycatch, they can’t explain why this year is so much cleaner than the previous one.
After weeks of delays and public mishaps, Shell is making some progress on its Arctic drilling expedition — and they’re asking the federal government to meet them halfway.
In the last week, both of Shell’s drill ships departed Unalaska for the Arctic. The Noble Discoverer drill rig, which made headlines when it dragged anchor and almost came aground on Airport Beach in June, left on Saturday morning. It’s bound for the Chukchi Sea. The Kulluk drill ship is now halfway to the Beaufort Sea.
But the drilling season is already almost over: There’s only a month left to drill in the Chukchi, and two months left in the Beaufort. That’s why Shell is asking the government for more time.
Earlier this summer, American Seafoods had to pay out $700,000 for Clean Air Act violations in the Bering Sea. Now, the fishing giant faces another big penalty. The company is currently defending itself against charges of fish fraud.
When NIOSH started investigating injuries to Alaskan seiners a few years ago, they found a common theme. Researchers were able to trace countless instances of crushing, amputation, and drowning back to getting tangled up in their gear.
"They get caught up and wrapped. And once they get wrapped, they can’t reach the controls to shut down the winch," says Chelsea Woodward. Woodward is one of four researchers on NIOSH’s commercial fishing safety team. He serves as an engineer, and it was his job to design a simple tool based on NIOSH’s seiner research.
Shell still hasn’t received final permits for its Arctic drilling plans, but the company is starting to send vessels north anyways.
Two of the company’s support vessels – the Aiviq and the Fennica – left Unalaska early this week for the Chukchi Sea. The icebreaker Tor Viking is expected to join them in the next few days. Together, the vessels will start prepping the drill site for the Noble Discoverer’s arrival.
“This is what planning for success looks like and this is what efficiency looks like," says Shell spokesperson Curtis Smith. "And these are days, of course, in a shortened season already that we want to use as efficiently as possible.”
PenAir is cutting back on service to remote communities in southwest Alaska. The airline announced Wednesday that going forward, it will focus on flights to hub communities, like Unalaska and Dillingham.
The largest community that the announcement will affect is Akutan. PenAir President Danny Seybert sent a letter to the Department of Transportation Wednesday notifying them that the airline no longer wants to fly to the community. PenAir’s Akutan service has been financed by federal subsidies through the DOT’s Essential Air Service program. PenAir’s EAS contract for Akutan isn’t set to expire until April 2013, but Seybert says the airline wants to cut that route as soon as September 1. That’s when Akutan’s new airstrip, on uninhabited Akun Island, is set to open.
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.
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.
