Latest news with #Aleut
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Conservative activist and former radio host files to run for Alaska governor
May 13—JUNEAU — Bernadette Wilson, a conservative activist, business owner and former radio host, filed to run as a Republican for Alaska governor in the 2026 election. Wilson, a lifelong Alaskan, has not held elected office, but she has experience in Alaska politics. She was campaign manager in 2010 for a ballot initiative requiring parental notification for abortions, and is a sponsor of another initiative to repeal ranked choice voting. She is also the president of waste management company Denali Disposal Inc. She is the grand-niece of former Alaska Gov. Walter J. "Wally" Hickel and is of Aleut heritage, according to an announcement from her campaign on Tuesday. Wilson said her priorities include getting infrastructure and roads built and addressing "bloat" in the budget with a high number of public employees in Alaska. She launched her campaign Tuesday on the steps of the Alaska State Capitol. She joked that was the "belly of the beast." Wilson is the third Republican candidate to file a letter of intent to run in the gubernatorial election next year — the first step to formally starting a campaign. Lt. Gov. Nancy Dahlstrom and former Fairbanks state Sen. Click Bishop both filed to run for governor earlier in the month.
IOL News
29-04-2025
- General
- IOL News
The impact of climate change on St. Paul Island: a community in crisis
An island in the Bering Sea, St. Paul has been ravaged by climate change — which has affected the island's economy and community. Image: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post This tiny island in the middle of the Bering Sea had recently completed its longest winter stretch in recorded history with above-freezing temperatures - 343 consecutive hours, or 14 days - when Aaron Lestenkof drove out to look at Sea Lion Neck. It was another warm February day. He saw no sea ice; scant snow on the ground. LLestenkof is one of the sentinels on the island, a small team with the Aleut tribe who monitor changes to the environment across these 43 square miles of windswept hills and tundra. He is also one of 338 residents who still manage to live on St. Paul, something that has become significantly more complicated as the Bering Sea warms around them. Over the past decade, steadily warming waters have thrown the North Pacific into turmoil, wiping out populations of fish, birds and crabs, and exposing coastlines to ever more battering from winter storms. The upheaval in the waters has brought so much change to this remote island, where residents still fill their freezers with reindeer and seals, that it has forced many to consider how long they can last. Fishing boats near the island's now-shuttered crab processing plant. Image: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post The warm waters killed off about 4 million common murres - the largest die-off of any bird species ever recorded in the modern era - including almost 80 percent of those that nested on St. Paul. They wiped out about 10 billion snow crabs; caused the collapse of the main Alaskan fishery that relied on them; and prompted the closing, three years ago, of St. Paul's largest source of tax revenue, a Trident Seafoods crab processing plant. City funds fell by 60 percent. The number of city employees dropped from 43 to 18. The police force disbanded. People moved away. And prices, already high, rose further at the island's lone grocery store - where eggs were selling for $14.66 a carton. The experience of St. Paul shows how changes to the climate, incremental until they become unmistakable, can ripple through the social fabric. Once a bustling winter hub for crab processing, with stately homes built in the 1920s and a historic Russian Orthodox church, St. Paul is quieter now. On many nights in the island's lone bar, where Lestenkof plays bass on Fridays, they don't bother to put out the chairs. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ Lestenkof, 40, went to school alongside more than 100 classmates, he recalled. Enrollment is now 52 students. The Trident plant used to rumble at all hours and hiss out a boiled-crab-smelling steam. The harbor thronged with boats. 'It looked like a city around the whole island, just lit up orange,' he recalled. When he was young, he would crouch next to his father on the rocky promontory of Sea Lion Neck to hunt low-flying king eider ducks, or Steller sea lions as they swam past. Years later, he helped geologists from the mainland set up stakes to gauge the rate of erosion until eventually the stakes washed away. The reason, he said, is planetary warming. The sea ice that used to encircle the island almost every winter rarely does anymore, exposing the land to more punishing winter storms that claw away bluffs and dunes, including huge chunks of a hillside beneath the island cemetery. 'We're not freezing in the winter like we used to be,' he said. He stood on the shore, looking out over the waves to the small spit of land, all that is left of the eroded promontory. 'We used to walk straight across,' Lestenkof said. 'It just took a couple good storms to wash this away.' The demise of Sea Lion Neck came gradually, then all at once. A tragic history In 1923, an official with the Commerce Department, G. Dallas Hanna, completed a draft of his manuscript 'The Alaska Fur Seal Islands' after spending eight years on St. Paul, one of four volcanic islands known as the Pribilofs. He found the winter climate disagreeable. He wrote that incessant winds and raw marine air make it 'as necessary to wear proper arctic clothing here as it would be in temperatures of 40°F below zero.' 'Drift ice usually visits the islands every winter,' Hanna wrote. Each year, the sea ice would spread down from the Arctic and across the Bering Sea Shelf, often enveloping St. Paul in a sheet of white. The island's interplay with this ice and the cold, salty water it left behind, has been fundamental to the teeming web of marine life on the Pribilofs. And those bountiful resources - particularly the millions of northern fur seals that hauled themselves up onto shore each spring to breed - are what made the islands so attractive to the Russians who first arrived in the 1780s. St. Paul was uninhabited then, but the Russians brought in Alaska Natives from the Aleutian chain as forced labor to kill the seals for their pelts. After the United States bought Alaska a century later, the federal government eventually took complete control of the Pribilof Islands and its fur trade. The Native families who lived there were treated as wards of the state until 1983. The Aleut workers at times were paid in government store credit, often not enough to feed their families, according to 'Slaves of the Harvest,' a history of the Aleut experience on the island by Barbara Boyle Torrey. Children caught speaking the traditional language would have their mouths taped. The Commerce Department agents who ran the fur seal trade controlled where residents could live, when they could leave the island, and when they could hunt and fish. During World War II, the U.S. military forced residents off the islands for two years and made them live in an abandoned salmon cannery hundreds of miles away, where many died. Elders who lived through the federal government's occupation of St. Paul recall the brutal conditions, doing hard labor for a pittance and having little control over their lives. 'We were slaves, actual slaves,' said Gregory Fratis Sr., 85, one of the last remaining fluent speakers of Unangam Tunuu, the traditional language of the Aleut people. He recalled that his father was paid $300 as a bonus at the end of a year of seal killing, but earned no salary. Fratis was in his car at the edge of the harbor as the temperature dropped in the afternoon, feeding raw hot dogs to arctic fox pups that lived in the rocks by the shore. No one else was around. 'Rowdy! Rocky! Come here baby!' he called to the foxes by name, who scampered up to his car. 'Qaqax̂! Qaqax̂! [Kaka! Kaka!] - in Aleut, that means food.' Fratis had recently attended the Aleut tribe's annual meeting. He was worried about its finances. The declines of halibut, crab and fur seals - whose numbers have steadily dropped for decades, long after the fur trade was outlawed. He complained about the neglected houses around town not being fixed up. 'The city is the one that's really hit hard. And they have to raise their utilities, I don't blame them,' he said. They do it, he said, 'in order to exist.' 'Use that word,' he repeated: 'Exist.' He turned back to the foxes. 'Qaqax̂! Qaqax̂!' A community unraveled To St. Paul City Manager Phil Zavadil, the crab crash sounds like silence. From his perch at city hall, he can see the Trident plant. During winter processing season, it would roughly double the island's population. Its galley functioned as the island's only restaurant. Although many of the workers were brought in from elsewhere, they injected money into the local economy, including at the grocery store, whose business has fallen by about 50 percent, according to its managers. St. Paul's four-person police department disbanded in 2021; the town struggled to recruit or pay replacements. Alaska flies in state troopers to make arrests from Anchorage, almost 800 miles away. 'It's a logistical nightmare to get out there,' said Lt. Daniel Blizzard, a deputy commander for western Alaska. Five years ago, 36 of the island's roughly 200 homes stood vacant or uninhabitable. That number has crept up to 48. With no local police force, residents said they feel less safe. In recent months there have been assaults and the alleged attempted kidnapping of a minor, law enforcement officials said. Blizzard and another trooper flew to the island one day in late February to arrest a man who was charged with seven felonies, including sexual abuse of a minor and incest, according to the Division of Alaska State Troopers. Zavadil picked them up at the airport, set amid fields of grass and wild celery where a herd of reindeer roam. Zavadil now also functions as St. Paul's acting director of public safety, as well as its acting director of public works, harbormaster, volunteer fire chief, and whatever else comes up. He is a former AmeriCorps Vista volunteer from Southern California who moved to the island in 1998, when its population surpassed 500 people. He worked for the Aleut tribe for 18 years - founding its Ecosystem Conservation Office - before becoming city manager. 'Knock on wood,' he said. 'We haven't had a public safety threat that threatens the whole community.' Ethan Candyfire served for a couple years as a police officer here before taking a job as the DJ at the radio station. Candyfire coaches youth basketball, paints murals and plays drums in one of the two island bands. Candyfire, who moved to the island 14 years ago from Oklahoma, thinks about leaving. He also values the freedom of living here, so far from everyone else, and the bonds of their community. The island still feels wild and timeless. Whales spout offshore. His kids swim in pristine lakes near where woolly mammoth teeth have been found. Anyone who lives on the island can hunt the reindeer at any time. They are one of the winners as the climate warms. With warmer summers, there is more vegetation, and they feast on wild celery root. The herd has grown to almost 1,000 strong, more than the Ecosystem Conservation Office would like. With grocery prices so high, Candyfire wanted to stock his freezer with meat. Zavadil taught him how to hunt, skin, and butcher a reindeer. But Candyfire felt rusty. He crept across the tundra, staying low behind ridges until he got in position. When he fired, the herd broke into a run, assembling into a tight, spinning circle, the females and young in the protected center. He aimed and fired a second time, and missed again. When he got back to the van he packed up his rifle. 'I guess Hamburger Helper tonight, not backstrap,' he said. The collapse of a species The sea ice that used to envelop St. Paul has done so only once since 2013, and then only fleetingly. 'Now, most years it doesn't come at all,' said Brian Brettschneider, Alaska region climatologist for the National Weather Service. 'And it's not coming this year.' Since 1940, the average surface temperature of the central Bering Sea around St. Paul has risen 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit - with a particularly elevated period between 2014 and 2021, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. The two million metric tons of groundfish harvested there each year are a crucial part of the nation's food supply. Decades of fisheries research here had developed such a finely grained picture of the marine ecosystem that scientists used to be able to predict with startling accuracy the performance of fish and crab stocks even years out, said Bill Tweit, vice-chair of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which manages Alaskan fisheries including in the Bering Sea. Climate change has blown up that confidence, an impact Tweit likened to someone pushing down the plunger on a 'big box of TNT.' The Bering Sea's record-breaking heat wave started in 2018. Erin Fedewa, a fisheries biologist, saw firsthand the carnage wrought by this explosion during NOAA's annual survey of crab and fish populations as the waters warmed. In 2021, she spent two months on a bottom trawl boat. Three years earlier, her nets teemed with young snow crab. Now they were coming up empty. Between hauls, she would study the historical numbers and send messages to colleagues onshore trying to express the gravity of what she was discovering. 'Something crazy is going on here,' she recalled thinking. The subsequent research by Fedewa and others on the disappearance of more than 90 percent of the population found that warmer water sped up the crabs' metabolism and led to a mass starvation event. The past few years have seen cooler waters in the Bering Sea. Snow crab started to recover and the Bering Sea fishery reopened last year with a small quota, although St. Paul's processing plant stayed closed. Federal disaster funds and a share of tax revenue from crab delivered to other ports have helped stabilize city finances. This winter, however, ice in the Bering Sea has again been disappointing, part of a record low across the Arctic. And for the past three months, a warm trend has reemerged. 'The southern Bering Sea is in heat wave status again right now,' said Elizabeth Siddon, a NOAA Fisheries biologist in Juneau who leads the Bering Sea ecosystem status report. 'Where did they all go?' What is happening in those waters will, one way or another, be felt on St. Paul. There is the possibility we may soon know less about why. The accumulated knowledge of the ecosystem and the sea around it comes from years of work by residents and U.S. government scientists who have been studying it for decades. The Ecosystem Conservation Office has heard from colleagues in federal agencies that funding and staff cuts might prevent their field visits this year. 'All of that work is on the chopping block,' said Lauren Divine, director of the ecosystem office. NOAA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined to comment on whether research would be interrupted. The decline of the fur seals that once attracted fortune-hunters to this island from around the world remains a mystery.
Yomiuri Shimbun
28-04-2025
- General
- Yomiuri Shimbun
Ice All but Disappeared from This Alaskan Island. It Changed Everything.
Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post An island in the Bering Sea, St. Paul has been ravaged by climate change — which has affected the island's economy and community. ST. PAUL ISLAND, Alaska – This tiny island in the middle of the Bering Sea had recently completed its longest winter stretch in recorded history with above-freezing temperatures – 343 consecutive hours, or 14 days – when Aaron Lestenkof drove out to look at Sea Lion Neck. It was another warm February day. He saw no sea ice; scant snow on the ground. Lestenkof is one of the sentinels on the island, a small team with the Aleut tribe who monitors changes to the environment across these 43 square miles of windswept hills and tundra. He is also one of 338 residents who still manage to live on St. Paul, something that has become significantly more complicated as the Bering Sea warms around them. Over the past decade, steadily warming waters have thrown the North Pacific into turmoil, wiping out populations of fish, birds, and crabs, and exposing coastlines to ever more battering from winter storms. The upheaval in the waters has brought so much change to this remote island, where residents still fill their freezers with reindeer and seals, it has forced many to consider how long they can last. The warm waters killed off about 4 million common murres – the largest die-off of any bird species ever recorded in the modern era – including almost 80 percent of those that nested on St. Paul. They wiped out about 10 billion snow crabs; caused the collapse of the main Alaskan fishery that relied on them; and prompted the closing, three years ago, of St. Paul's largest source of tax revenue, a Trident Seafoods crab processing plant. City funds fell by 60 percent. The number of city employees dropped from 43 to 18. The police force disbanded. People moved away. And prices, already high, rose further at the island's lone grocery store – where eggs were selling for $14.66 a carton. The experience of St. Paul shows how changes to the climate, incremental until they become unmistakable, can ripple through the social fabric. Once a bustling winter hub for crab processing, with stately homes built in the 1920s and a historic Russian Orthodox church, St. Paul is quieter now. On many nights in the island's lone bar, where Lestenkof plays bass on Fridays, they don't bother to put out the chairs. Lestenkof, 40, went to school alongside more than 100 classmates, he recalled. Enrollment is now 52 students. The Trident plant used to rumble at all hours and hiss out a boiled-crab-smelling steam. The harbor thronged with boats. 'It looked like a city around the whole island, just lit up orange,' he recalled. When he was young, he would crouch next to his father on the rocky promontory of Sea Lion Neck to hunt low-flying king eider ducks, or Steller sea lions as they swam past. Years later, he helped geologists from the mainland set up stakes to gauge the rate of erosion until eventually the stakes washed away. The reason, he says, is planetary warming. The sea ice that used to encircle the island almost every winter rarely does anymore, exposing the land to more punishing winter storms that claw away bluffs and dunes, including huge chunks of a hillside beneath the island cemetery. 'We're not freezing in the winter like we used to be,' he said. He stood on the shore, looking out over the waves to the small spit of land, all that is left of the eroded promontory. 'We used to walk straight across,' Lestenkof said. 'It just took a couple good storms to wash this away.' The demise of Sea Lion Neck came gradually, then all at once. A tragic history In 1923, an official with the U.S. Department of Commerce, Dr. G. Dallas Hanna, completed a draft of his manuscript, 'The Alaska Fur Seal Islands,' after spending eight years on St. Paul, one of four volcanic islands known as the Pribilofs. He found the winter climate disagreeable. He wrote that incessant winds and raw marine air make it 'as necessary to wear proper arctic clothing here as it would be in temperatures of 40°F below zero.' 'Drift ice usually visits the islands every winter,' Hanna wrote. Each year, the sea ice would spread down from the Arctic and across the Bering Sea Shelf, often enveloping St. Paul in a sheet of white. The island's interplay with this ice and the cold, salty water it left behind, has been fundamental to the teeming web of marine life on the Pribilofs. And those bountiful resources – particularly the millions of northern fur seals that hauled themselves up onto shore each spring to breed – are what made the islands so attractive to the Russians who first arrived in the 1780s. St. Paul was uninhabited then, but the Russians brought in Native Alaskans from the Aleutian chain as forced labor to kill the seals for their pelts. After the United States bought Alaska a century later, the federal government eventually took complete control of the Pribilof Islands and its fur trade. The native families who lived there were treated as wards of the state until 1983. The Aleut workers at times were paid in government store credit, often not enough to feed their families, according to 'Slaves of the Harvest,' a history of the Aleut experience on the island by Barbara Boyle Torrey. Children caught speaking the traditional language would have their mouths taped. The Commerce Department agents who ran the fur seal trade controlled where residents could live, when they could leave the island, and when they could hunt and fish. During World War II, the U.S. military forced residents off the islands for two years and made them live in an abandoned salmon cannery hundreds of miles away, where many died. Elders who lived through the federal government's occupation of St. Paul recall the brutal conditions, doing hard labor for a pittance and having little control over their lives. 'We were slaves, actual slaves,' said Gregory Fratis Sr., 85, one of the last remaining fluent speakers of Unangam Tunuu, the traditional language of the Aleut people. He recalled that his father was paid $300 as a bonus at the end of a year of seal killing, but earned no salary. Fratis was in his car at the edge of the harbor as the temperature dropped in the afternoon, feeding raw hot dogs to arctic fox pups that lived in the rocks by the shore. No one else was around. 'Rowdy! Rocky! Come here baby!' he called to the foxes by name, who scampered up to his car. 'Qaqax̂! Qaqax̂! [Kaka! Kaka!] – in Aleut, that means food.' Fratis had recently attended the Aleut tribe's annual meeting. He was worried about its finances. The declines of halibut, crab, and fur seals – whose numbers have steadily dropped for decades, long after the fur trade was outlawed. He complained about the neglected houses around town not being fixed up. 'The city is the one that's really hit hard. And they have to raise their utilities, I don't blame them,' he said. They do it, he said, 'in order to exist.' 'Use that word,' he repeated: 'Exist.' He turned back to the foxes. 'Qaqax̂! Qaqax̂!' A community unraveled To St. Paul City Manager Phil Zavadil, the crab crash sounds like silence. From his perch at city hall, he can see the Trident plant. During winter processing season, it would roughly double the island's population. Its galley functioned as the island's only restaurant. Although many of the workers were brought in from elsewhere, they injected money into the local economy, including at the grocery store, whose business has fallen by about 50 percent, according to its managers. St. Paul's four-person police department disbanded in 2021; the town struggled to recruit or pay replacements. Alaska flies in state troopers to make arrests from Anchorage, almost 800 miles away. 'It's a logistical nightmare to get out there,' said Lt. Daniel Blizzard, a deputy commander for western Alaska. Five years ago, 36 of the island's roughly 200 homes stood vacant or uninhabitable. That number has crept up to 48. With no local police force, residents said they feel less safe. In recent months there have been assaults and the alleged attempted kidnapping of a minor, law enforcement officials said. Blizzard and another trooper flew to the island one day in late February to arrest a man who was charged with seven felonies, including sexual abuse of a minor and incest, according to the Division of Alaska State Troopers. Zavadil picked them up at the airport, set amid fields of grass and wild celery where a herd of reindeer roam. Zavadil now also functions as St. Paul's acting director of public safety, as well as its acting director of public works, harbormaster, volunteer fire chief, and whatever else comes up. He is a former AmeriCorps Vista volunteer from Southern California who moved to the island in 1998, when its population surpassed 500 people. He worked for the Aleut tribe for 18 years – founding its Ecosystem Conservation Office – before becoming city manager. 'Knock on wood,' he said. 'We haven't had a public safety threat that threatens the whole community.' Ethan Candyfire served for a couple years as a police officer here before taking a job as the DJ at the radio station. Candyfire coaches youth basketball, paints murals, and plays drums in one of the two island bands. Candyfire, who moved to the island 14 years ago from Oklahoma, thinks about leaving. He also values the freedom of living here, so far from everyone else, and the bonds of their community. The island still feels wild and timeless. Whales spout offshore. His kids swim in pristine lakes near where woolly mammoth teeth have been found. Anyone can hunt the reindeer at any time. They are one of the winners as the climate warms. With warmer summers, there is more vegetation, and they feast on wild celery root. The herd has grown to almost 1,000 strong, more than the Ecosystem Conservation Office would like. With grocery prices so high, Candyfire wanted to stock his freezer with meat. Zavadil taught him how to hunt, skin, and butcher a reindeer. But Candyfire felt rusty. He crept across the tundra, staying low behind ridges until he got in position. When he fired, the herd broke into a run, assembling into a tight, spinning circle, the females and young in the protected center. He aimed and fired a second time, and missed again. When he got back to the van he packed up his rifle. 'I guess hamburger helper tonight, not backstrap,' he said. The collapse of a species The sea ice that used to envelop St. Paul has done so only once since 2013, and then only fleetingly. 'Now, most years it doesn't come at all,' said Brian Brettschneider, Alaska region climatologist for the National Weather Service. 'And it's not coming this year.' Since 1940, the average surface temperature of the central Bering Sea around St. Paul has risen 2.4 degrees Fahrenheit – with a particularly elevated period between 2014 and 2021, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data. The 2 million metric tons of groundfish harvested there each year are a crucial part of the nation's food supply. Decades of fisheries research here had developed such a finely grained picture of the marine ecosystem that scientists used to be able to predict with startling accuracy the performance of fish and crab stocks even years out, said Bill Tweit, vice-chair of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, which manages Alaskan fisheries including in the Bering Sea. Climate change has blown up that confidence, an impact Tweit likened to someone pushing down the plunger on a 'big box of TNT.' The Bering Sea's record-breaking heat wave started in 2018. Erin Fedewa, a fisheries biologist, saw firsthand the carnage wrought by this explosion during NOAA's annual survey of crab and fish populations as the waters warmed. In 2021, she spent two months on a bottom trawl boat. Three years earlier, her nets teemed with young snow crab. Now they were coming up empty. Between hauls, she would study the historical numbers and send messages to colleagues onshore trying to express the gravity of what she was discovering. 'Something crazy is going on here,' she recalled thinking. The subsequent research by Fedewa and others on the disappearance of more than 90 percent of the population found that warmer water sped up the crabs' metabolism and led to a mass starvation event. The past few years have seen cooler waters in the Bering Sea. Snow crab started to recover and the Bering Sea fishery reopened last year with a small quota, although St. Paul's processing plant stayed closed. Federal disaster funds and a share of tax revenue from crab delivered to other ports have helped stabilize city finances. This winter, however, ice in the Bering Sea has again been disappointing, part of a record low across the Arctic. And for the past three months, a warm trend has reemerged. 'The southern Bering Sea is in heat wave status again right now,' said Elizabeth Siddon, a NOAA Fisheries biologist in Juneau who leads the Bering Sea ecosystem status report. 'Where did they all go?' What is happening in those waters will, one way or another, be felt on St. Paul. There is the possibility we may soon know less about why. The accumulated knowledge of the ecosystem and the sea around it comes from years of work by residents and U.S. government scientists who have been studying it for decades. The Ecosystem Conservation Office has heard from colleagues in federal agencies that funding and staff cuts might prevent their field visits this year. 'All of that work is on the chopping block,' said Lauren Divine, director of the ecosystem office. NOAA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined to comment on whether research would be interrupted. The decline of the fur seals that once attracted fortune-hunters to this island from around the world remains a mystery. Rodney Towell, a NOAA statistician, has been visiting St. Paul to count those seals for the past 37 years. There were about 182,000 fur seals born his first year and 67,000 in his most recent estimate. Whether the driving force is an inability to find food, disease, overfishing, warming waters or some combination of other factors is still largely unknown, he said. In August, 10 dead sea lions washed up on a beach near Sea Lion Neck, a baffling discovery that confounded the ecosystem office. Its analysis now suggests they died from a toxin in an algal bloom – possibly connected to warmer waters. Another small erosion in a long decline. 'When I first started working there, it was phenomenal,' Towell recalled. 'You look across the rookery, the cacophony of noise coming up out of that – I mean, it was just stunning.' That carpet of fur seals now appears as clumps and patches. 'And it's just like, where did they all go?' he wondered. 'It's really disappointing. Almost painful.' Paul Melovidov, 64, who leads the indigenous sentinel program with the tribe's ecosystem office, described the same experience watching seabirds thin out. The magnificent, uncountable flocks that would descend each spring is something his younger colleagues will not get to see. 'It was paradise,' he said.
Yahoo
23-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Companies to build $32.7M maintenance, repair and overhaul hangar at Pryor Field
Apr. 23—Aleut Real Estate and Strata G Solutions plan to build a $32.7 million maintenance, repair and overhaul hangar at Pryor Field Regional Airport that will be large enough for an Air Force cargo airplane. "Within the lifecycle of the aircraft, they only fly so many hours before they have to come in for an overhaul or parts and pieces to be replaced. We're looking to get into that space and that activity," said Strata G Executive Vice President Calvin Lane. "We try to stay within the FAA constrains and provide that service to DOD (Department of Defense), commercial industries as well as private entities." Lane said one of their contractors is Boeing. He said they also service most of the military branches, including Air Force, Navy, Army, Coast Guard and Customs Border Patrol. The hangar, Lane said, will be large enough to fit a Lockheed C-130 military aircraft. Lengths range from about 97 feet to about 112 feet long. They are over 38 feet tall and have a wingspan of over 132 feet. "The decision by Strata G Solutions to invest in Limestone County at Pryor Field Regional Airport further reinforces the strategic role our area plays in aviation and defense," said Pryor Field Manager Adam Fox. "We're proud to support companies like this that align with the airport's mission to grow aviation-related industry and create opportunity throughout our region." Strata G is a subsidiary of Aleut. "ARE (Aleut) is funding the building and paying for the construction, and then Strata G will occupy that building," said Strata G Senior Project Manager John W. Jones. Lane said Aleut is based out of Anchorage, Alaska, while Strata G is based in Huntsville. "We'll basically be managing their property here at Decatur's Pryor Airport," he said. At Monday's Limestone County Commission meeting, the commission approved an abatement for the companies. They are projecting 50 aviation-related jobs in three years with a capital investment of $32.7 million. They will receive an abatement of non-educational sales and use taxes during construction. During construction, the companies will save about $664,000 on taxes and the schools will receive $342,000. The property tax abatement will be a savings of about $1.04 million over 10 years, but they will be paying the schools $796,952 over the same period. Under state law, education taxes cannot be abated. "This project is a win on every level," said Limestone County Economic Development Association President and CEO Bethany Shockney. "Strata G Solutions and Aleut Real Estate bring tremendous value to our local economy and workforce. Their investment underscores Limestone County's continued emergence as a hub for high tech and advanced manufacturing operations." Last month, the Limestone County Commission announced that they would use state funding of $776,400 to construct a new road from Airport Road to Pryor Field to help with the airport's expansion and also repair a portion of Airport Road. "This investment reflects continued confidence in Limestone County's ability to attract and support world-class industrial operations," said Limestone County Commission Chairman Collin Daly. "We're excited to partner with Strata G Solutions and Aleut Real Estate as they grow their footprint here and create new, high-quality jobs for our residents." Fite Building Co. will construct the facility. "Anywhere from three to four months to moving dirt; that's the goal," Jones said. "We have a pathway of about 18 months from breaking ground, finishing all the drawings and get it up and running." The hangar's completion is slated for early 2027. — or 256-340-2460.
Yahoo
19-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Alaska Natives want the US military to clean up its toxic waste
In June 1942, Japan's invasion of the Aleutian islands in Alaska prompted the U.S. military to activate the Alaska territorial guard, an Army reserve made up of volunteers who wanted to help protect the U.S. So many of the volunteers were from Alaska's Indigenous peoples — Aleut, Inupiak, Yupik, Tlingit, and many others — that the guard was nicknamed the 'Eskimo Scouts.' When World War II ended and the reserve force ceased operations in 1947, the U.S. approached the Indigenous Yupik people of Alaska with another ask: Could the Air Force set up 'listening posts' on the island of Sivuqaq, also known as St. Lawrence Island, to help with the intelligence gathering needed to win the Cold War? Viola Waghiyi, who is Yupik from Sivuqaq, said the answer was a resounding yes. 'Our grandfathers and fathers volunteered for the Alaska territorial guard,' she said. 'We were very patriotic.' But that trust was abused, Waghiyi said. The U.S. military eventually abandoned its Air Force and Army bases, leaving the land polluted with toxic chemicals such as fuel, mercury, and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, that are known as 'forever chemicals' because they persist so long in the environment. The contamination was largely due to spilled and leaking fuel from storage tanks and pipes, both above ground and below ground. More chemical waste came from electrical transformers, abandoned metals and 55-gallon drums. Now, Waghiyi is the environmental health and justice program director at the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, an organization dedicated to limiting the effects of toxic substances on Alaska's residents and environment. Last week, the organization filed a complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, in partnership with the U.C. Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic. Their complaint calls for the United Nations to investigate how military waste on Sivuqaq continues to violate the rights of the people who live there, such as the right to a clean and healthy environment and Indigenous peoples' right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land. 'By exposing the Yupik people of Sivuqaq to polluted drinking water sources, air, and soil, and by contaminating local native foods; by causing pervasive human exposure to hazardous chemicals through multiple routes; by toxifying the broader ecosystem; and by not cleaning up contamination sufficiently to protect human health and the environment, the U.S. Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers violated human rights long recognized in international law,' the complaint says. This submission from Alaska is part of a larger, global effort to raise awareness of military toxic waste by the United Nations. The U.N. special rapporteur on toxics and human rights is collecting public input on military activities and toxic waste until April 1. The information collected will be used in a report presented to the U.N. General Assembly in October. The two shuttered bases in Sivuqaq, Alaska, are now classified as 'formerly used defense,' or FUD, sites, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and more than $130 million has been spent to remove the contamination. John Budnick, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska, said the cleanup is considered complete but that the agency is reviewing the site every five years 'to ensure the selected remedies continue to be protective of human health and the environment.' 'We have completed the work at Northeast Cape, but additional follow-up actions may result from the monitoring phase of the Formerly Used Defense Sites Program,' he said. The last site visit occurred last July and an updated review report is expected to be released this summer. The federal Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, similarly concluded in 2013 that an additional EPA cleanup wouldn't significantly differ from what the Army Corps of Engineers is doing and declined to place the sites on the EPA's list of hazardous waste cleanup priorities. A 2022 study found that so far, federal cleanup efforts have been inadequate. 'High levels of persistent organic pollutants and toxic metals continue to leach from the Northeast Cape FUD site despite large-scale remediation that occurred in the early 2000s,' the authors concluded. The persisting pollution has garnered the attention of Alaska's state Dept. of Environmental Conservation which oversees the cleanup of contaminated sites. Stephanie Buss, contaminated sites program manager at the agency, said her office has asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do additional cleanup at Northeast Cape. 'These active contaminated sites have not met closure requirements,' she said. The second former base, Gambell, was classified as completed but still lacks land use controls, she noted. 'DEC takes community health concerns seriously and will continue to provide oversight of the conditions at its active sites in accordance with the state's regulatory framework to ensure an appropriate response that protects human health and welfare,' Buss said. That same 2022 study found that 89 percent of the fish around the Northeast Cape base contained mercury exceeding the levels the EPA deemed appropriate for people who rely on subsistence fishing. 'All fish sampled near the FUD site exceeded the EPA's PCB guidelines for cancer risk for unrestricted human consumption,' the researchers further found. Waghiyi said the contamination displaced 130 people, and has left her friends and family with a lasting legacy of illness. 'It's not a matter of if we'll get cancer, but when,' Waghiyi said. Her father died of cancer. Her mother had a stillborn child. Waghiyi herself is a cancer survivor and has had three miscarriages. 'We feel that they have turned their back on us,' Waghiyi said of the U.S. military. 'We wanted our lands to be turned back in the same condition when they turned over.' The U.S. military has a long history of contaminating lands and waters through military training and battles sites, including on Indigenous lands. Citizens of the Navajo Nation in Arizona and Yakama Nation in Washington continue to raise concerns about the ongoing effects of military nuclear testing on their lands and health. In the Marshall Islands, fishing around certain atolls is discouraged due to high rates of toxicity due to nuclear testing and other military training. On Guam, chemicals from an active Air Force base have contaminated parts of the islandʻs sole-source aquifer that serves 70% of the population. Last year, a federal report found that climate change threatens to unearth even more U.S. military nuclear waste in both the Marshall Islands and Greenland. In 2021, the Navy in Hawaiʻi poisoned 90,000 people when jet fuel leached from aging, massive underground storage tanks into the drinking water supply after the Navy ignored years of warning to upgrade the tanks or remove the fuel. The federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to remove unexploded ordnance from the island of Kahoʻolawe, a former bombing range in Hawaiʻi, but the island is still considered dangerous to walk on because of the risk of more ordnance unearthing due to extensive erosion. The complaint filed last week by the Alaska Community Action on Toxics calls for the United Nations to write to U.S. federal and state agencies and call upon them to honor a 1951 agreement between the U.S. government and the Sivuqaq Yupik people that prohibited polluting the land. The agreement said that the Sivuqaq Tribes would allow the Air Force to construct surveillance sites to spy on the Soviet Union, but they had four conditions, including allowing Indigenous peoples to continue to hunt, fish and trap where desired and preventing outsiders from killing their game. Finally, the agreement said that 'any refuse or garbage will not be dumped in streams or near the beach within the proposed area.' 'The import of the agreement was clear: The military must not despoil the island; must protect the resources critical to Indigenous Yupik inhabitants' sustenance; and must leave the island in the condition they found it, which ensured their health and well-being,' the Alaska Community Action on Toxics wrote in their complaint. 'This is a burden we didn't create,' Waghiyi said. This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Alaska Natives want the US military to clean up its toxic waste on Mar 19, 2025.
