Unalaska, AK – Salvage crews are still working to stabilize a fishing vessel that ran aground on Hog Island early this morning.

The 93-foot-long Arctic Hunter ran aground at about 4:30 a.m. on the east side of the island. The ship hit starboard side first, but the wind spun it around and ran the port side up on the beach. The fishing vessel Vixen was able to pull the Arctic Hunter back out to sea at about 8:30, and the tugboat Saratoga towed it into Dutch Harbor to Magone Marine Service, where it is currently moored. The Arctic Hunter appeared to have sustained hull damage in the incident, and crews were busy dewatering the ship this afternoon.

Unalaska, AK – An 8.1-magnitude earthquake near Russia's Kuril Islands, west of the Aleutians, triggered a tsunami warning throughout coastal Alaska Friday evening. A wave was measured at about 27 inches on the western Aleutian island of Shemya, but Friday's tsunami was of negligible size by the time it reached the Eastern Aleutians.

Communities in coastal Alaska were on watch for about three hours starting at 7:33 p.m. The Unalaska Department of Public Safety called in all of its officers, as well as many volunteer firefighters and EMTs, who waited at the ready until the warning was called off at 10:30 p.m. The residents of Nikolski, a village located in a low-lying coastal area of nearby Umnak Island, evacuated to higher ground.

Unalaska, AK – The Unalaska City Council is far from agreement on several changes to how it holds meetings. That was the take-home message of Thursday's work session, the first in the council's tentative new meeting format, in which council members debated a raft of procedural changes that they supposedly agreed upon at the council's December 30 workshop.

A letter circulated by Mayor Shirley Marquardt summarizing the changes implied that the five council members who were at the workshop were in agreement on them. But as the discussion progressed, it became clear that council agreed on hardly any of them, a situation that perplexed council member Juanita Lewis.

Unalaska, AK – Response crews worked yesterday to contain a minor chemical spill on an American President Lines container ship in Dutch Harbor.

Personnel from APL, the Department of Public Safety and the U.S. Coast Guard responded to a chemical leak Wednesday afternoon onboard the APL Chile, a foreign-flagged ship that docked in Dutch Harbor late Wednesday morning. The chemical ethylenediamine was found leaking from a container onboard the ship. The container was filled with 55-gallon drums of the material from Dow Chemical, at least one of which presumably opened and spilled during shipping.

Unalaska, AK – The Unalaska City Council will meet for a work session at 7 p.m. tonight. This is the council's first meeting under its new system in which regular meetings and work sessions are held on alternating weeks. It was originally scheduled for Tuesday but postponed on account of the weather.

On the agenda tonight are a return to the issue of metal and nets in Unalaska's landfill, as well as a review of the mayor's and council's travel policy and the council's fiscal year 2008 Congressional funding requests. They'll also review discussions and proposed changes from the council's workshop earlier this month.

Unalaska, AK – Fishermen reached an agreement on opilio crab prices with another processor today. The members of the Inter-Cooperative Exchange agreed to $1.50 a pound from UniSea Inc., according to negotiator Greg White. That's slightly lower than the price reached with Westward Seafoods, but White says UniSea sweetened the deal by offering the same price for northern processing in the Pribilof Islands, which is more expensive for processors and accordingly can mean a lower price for fishermen.

Unalaska, AK – A series of earthquakes shook Unalaska starting early this morning. The largest of them, with a magnitude of 5.3, happened at 1:01 a.m. about 55 miles southwest of the island. It was followed in the next half-hour by 16 smaller quakes, according to geologist Cindy Preller of the West Coast & Alaska Tsunami Warning Center in Palmer.

Geologists call this kind of seismic event a "swarm." The jolts were preceded by three smaller quakes on Friday and Sunday. The event was of too small a magnitude to do any damage in Unalaska.

Unalaska, AK – Unalaska shut down this afternoon in preparation for a storm that looks less and less likely as the afternoon rolls on. The National Weather Service initially anticipated winds hitting the island at up to 80 mph and still has a high wind warning in effect through midnight tonight, but the weather station at the Unalaska Airport reports that today's wind speeds haven't topped 45 mph.

Unalaska, AK – A few boats have started in on the 2007 opilio crab season in the Bering Sea, now that one processor has put up a price for crab.

Westward Seafoods is offering $1.525 a pound for A shares, although agreements haven't been reached on B and C shares yet, according to Greg White, who negotiates prices for the Inter-Cooperative Exchange and represents about 70 percent of the Bering Sea crab fleet. White said that the price is a little short of what fishermen wanted, but it's still something they're willing to go to work for.