Getting home for the holidays is always an issue for Unalaskans, but it’s not just because of bad weather or cramped flights.

Scott Habberstad, the marketing director for Alaska Airlines, says the company has a pretty good idea of what the problem is.

"During A season, there's about 4500 people that want to go from the lower 48 to Dutch Harbor. And unfortunately, it coincides with Christmas," he says.

Pizza, mac and cheese, sandwiches – all that standard school lunch fare was noticeably absent from trays at Unalaska City High School on Friday. Tenth grader Renzel Hoover:

“Hoover: We’re having salmon and then bread and pudding, vegetables and some beans, and some rice too.
SJ: And do you guys normally have salmon for lunch?
Hoover: No, it’s actually the first time this year we’ve had salmon, so it’s kind of new, but it’s good.”

Turnpaugh's "Aleut Doll with Basket" is part of the Museum of the Aleutians collection (Rasmuson Foundation)

An Unangan elder known for her art and commitment to preserving the history of the Aleutians passed away this week at the age of 84.

Maria Turnpaugh was born in Unalaska in 1927 to Joe and Agnes Chagin. Her grandfather was a chief and a warden in the Russian Orthodox church. As a child, she learned Unangam Tunuu from her mother. She recalled her youth fondly and told stories about what life was like then with a sense of humor. In this clip from 1996, she describes family meals as part of the Communities of Memory project.

"Right now, DROP, COVER, AND HOLD ON."

At 10:18 this morning, those instructions blared over the speaker system at the Unalaska City School. In the library, at least a dozen kids huddled under tables and gripped on to the legs. They were taking part in the world’s largest earthquake drill – the “Great ShakeOut.” In Alaska, over 60,000 people registered for the drill, and across the world 14 million people have committed to participate.

Operations at Unalaska’s local TWIC office went smoothly this week, despite the failure of several off-site TSA servers on Saturday.

An alert was sent Monday that the office’s services would be limited because of technical difficulties experienced by MorphoTrust, a contractor with the Transportation Security Administration. The server outage was expected to prevent the activation of transportation worker identification credential cards – or TWIC cards for short. The cards are often a requirement for employment at secure maritime facilities in Unalaska.

As the king crab fisheries open up, the Bering Sea pollock fishery is winding down.

According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, the factory trawlers and motherships that make up the offshore sector have taken all of their annual allocation. Meanwhile, the catcher vessels that comprise the inshore sector are at 96 percent of their yearly quota. Nearly 700,000 metric tons of pollock had been taken through October 6.

It’s that time of year again. Sun transits are interfering with Unalaska’s telecommunication services.

Both TelAlaska and GCI are experiencing disruptions this month because of solar interference. GCI spokesperson David Morris explains what’s going on.

"The sun is directly positioned behind the satellite, and the solar energy of that will overpower the signal between the satellite and the earth station located on earth," says Morris. "That will cause a temporary outage, and it could be a few second. It could be 15, 20 minutes. It just really depends on a number of things. The most important of which is how larger that dish is: the smaller they are, the more of an outage you will have."

Tonight, city council will consider an irregular funding request from the Museum of the Aleutians.

Museum staff are asking for a $200,000 grant from the city's bed tax fund to put toward a new permanent exhibit. The bed tax on hotel and room reservations in Unalaska is set aside to pay for visitor industries, and historical and cultural programming.

The museum exhibit seems to fit into that category. But in a memo in to council included in the agenda packet, assistant city manager John Fulton says there isn't enough money in the tax fund to pay for the museum's request. Fulton lays out other options, and recommends that the city pay the grant in full using money from the general fund.

Just as the road-repaving project is wrapping up, a new road construction project is about to get underway.

Knik Construction outlined its plan for extending the airport runway at Tuesday night’s City Council meeting. According to project manager Greg Kelley, the company will start moving materials next week, with the goal of finishing up the first phase of the project by November 1. That phase will include moving Ballyhoo Road out into Iliuliuk Bay and could involve some traffic delays, although Kelley promised they would be minor.