The road into Hatcher Pass in the Talkeetna Mountains north of Palmer was expected to open Wednesday night after avalanches blocked it Monday morning.

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About 10 people were stranded in the pass when two separate snow slides came down from Marmot Mountain, piling debris across the roadway. Most of those stuck in the pass were reportedly staying at the well-provisioned Hatcher Pass Lodge.

Danger from further avalanches prevented crews from clearing the debris until avalanche mitigation work could be done, Department of Transportation spokesperson Shannon McCarthy said.

“They had just had 12 to 15 inches of new snow,” McCarthy said. “That’s that critical time within that 24 to 48 hours after a new snow that we’ll see a lot of slides let loose.”

The mitigation generally involves using explosives to intentionally trigger avalanches before removing the debris, and to do that, DOT will often shoot a howitzer cannon into an avalanche-prone mountainside. But the team in Hatcher Pass on Tuesday instead used what’s called a Daisy Bell system. That’s a bell-shaped piece of equipment that dangles on a line beneath a helicopter and can deliver a concussive blast to trigger a slide.

McCarthy said the Daisy Bell is much more precise than a cannon.

“In Hatcher Pass it’s narrow, there’s oftentimes weather, but we also oftentimes have people recreating in the area, and using the Howitzer would just not be conducive,” McCarthy said.

With the mitigation work done Tuesday, McCarthy says it was safe enough Wednesday to send plows, a snowblower and a grader into the pass to clear away the snow. That work was expected to be complete by 5 p.m.

Also Wednesday, DOT was dealing with a different type of mayhem on Southcentral roadways.

The southbound lanes of the Glenn Highway were shutdown near Eagle River Wednesday afternoon after an 18-wheeler carrying a tall load crashed into a bridge over the highway.

McCarthy said engineers were inspecting the bridge before motorists could travel either over it or underneath it. Drivers were able to bypass the area by detouring through Eagle River.

Stories are posted on the APRN news page. You can subscribe to APRN’s newsfeeds via email, podcast and RSS. Follow us on Facebook at alaskapublic.org and on Twitter @aprn

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Army Corps of Engineers schedules meetings for public Pebble input

Avery Lill, KDLG – Dillingham

The U.S. Army Corp of Engineers is asking for public input on the controversial Pebble Mine Proposal. In April, the federal agency will be holding meetings in Bristol Bay, Anchorage and Homer to hear the public’s views and concerns about the project.

Fisher seeks new sources of revenue for state

Andrew Kitchenman, KTOO – Juneau

Sheldon Fisher, Governor Bill Walker’s choice to be the next commissioner of the Alaska Department of Revenue, had a confirmation hearing in the Senate Finance Committee today.

After avalanche, crews clear road to Hatcher Pass

Casey Grove, Alaska Public Media – Anchorage

The road into Hatcher Pass in the Talkeetna Mountains north of Palmer was expected to open Wednesday night after avalanches blocked it Monday morning.

In thwarted home invasion, Alakanuk shooter stopped by daughter’s boyfriend

Teresa Cotsirilos, KYUK – Bethel

In a violent attempted home invasion last weekend, an Alakanuk man allegedly tried to shoot his daughter and infant granddaughter with a semi-automatic rifle. He was stopped in the arctic entryway by his daughter’s boyfriend, who armed himself, tackled the shooter and held him down until State Troopers arrived.

Perryville man arrested, charged with murdering his grandfather

Avery Lill, KDLG – Dillingham

Brandon Yagie, 21, was arrested in Perryville Monday and charged with killing his grandfather, 70-year-old Marvin Yagie.

Response to oil spill in the Shuyak Strait continues

Mitch Borden, KMXT – Kodiak

At the end of February, 3,000 gallons of oil spilled into the Shuyak Strait about 50 miles north of the City of Kodiak. The oil was in a building that collapsed because of a severe windstorm. Since then, a response has been underway to contain the oil, clean it up and prevent future spills.

Cost of Cold: Scavenging for coal off a Homer beach

Aaron Bolton, KBBI – Homer

About 20 percent of Homer residents have access to natural gas to heat their homes. For those who don’t, heating oil is an expensive alternative. That forces some residents to consider less conventional options- like coal.

Proposed Fairbanks ordinance would squelch ‘free market’, marijuana business owners say

Tim Ellis, KUAC – Fairbanks

Owners of local marijuana businesses told the Fairbanks City Council Monday that the free market should decide how many retail pot shops the city should allow.

Mentoring program to close in Haines, Homer, Hoonah, Sitka

Daysha Eaton, KHNS – Haines

Big Brothers Big Sisters of Alaska will no longer make new matches between youths and volunteers in four Alaska communities: Haines, Homer, Hoonah, and Sitka. The organization that matches volunteers and youth for one-on-one mentoring, says it’s a matter of reduced federal and state grant funding.

The Solutions Desk looks beyond Alaska’s problems and reports on its solutions – the people and programs working to make Alaska communities stronger. Listen to more solutions journalism stories and conversations, and share your own ideas here.

In order for most people to be healthy, they have to be able to access health care. And for more than 41,000 Alaskans, that problem was solved through Medicaid expansion. Andi Riley is one of them.

“We want this to feel like a second home to individuals,” Andi says as she walks around the comfortable, couch-filled room at her workplace. “Especially to people who don’t have a home.”

Andi works at the Alaska Mental Health Consumer Web, a drop-in center for people with mental illnesses that offers kitchen space and access to computers. She used to be a consumer herself when she was homeless. Now she’s an employee, touting business clothes and elegantly styled curls. But for a reality check, she points to her employee badge photo.

“That’s what this picture is about, with my flyaway hair. That’s my human side.” She says she doesn’t always look so put together.

A few years ago, when Andi first started working at the Web, she was struggling. Not with her mental health — with her physical health.

“There was a lot of things going on with my health,” she says. “I missed quite a few days of work, or was severely late and not able to very well manage my symptoms.”

[Related: What it takes to respond to a mental health crisis]

But she couldn’t afford to see a doctor, and she couldn’t get on Medicaid – she earned too much from her job. She fell into the gap. She ended up going to emergency rooms, even for minor things. Eventually, she realized that she couldn’t keep putting off dealing with how terrible she felt most of the time. She was finally admitted to a sliding-scale clinic and learned that she had type two diabetes. But a diagnosis didn’t help much.

“I couldn’t get treated,” she says. “I wouldn’t be able to afford the prescriptions. I couldn’t afford the ongoing care, like blood draws and doctors appointments.”

Then she got on Medicaid. Now she works consistently and can spend money on food and housing instead of medical bills.

Katie Baldwin-Johnson is with the Alaska Mental Health Trust, which is helping spearhead Medicaid reform and pay for some costs of expansion. She says Andi’s story is pretty typical. Low-income earners can’t afford to look after themselves, so they aren’t as healthy.

“They’re not taking care of themselves,” she says. “So having access to a primary care provider, for example, where maybe someone did not previously, certainly could help with stabilization in a work placement.”

Medicaid expansion started in Alaska in 2015 to provide health care to low-income adults who don’t have dependent children. The fight over it went all the way to the state Supreme Court. It was so controversial because Medicaid is one of the most expensive items in the state budget. But, for Medicaid expansion, the federal government pays more than 90 percent of the cost.

Katie says Medicaid expansion has been especially important for people with mental health issues. Access to medical providers helps catch illnesses before they get really serious and cost more to treat or cause other problems. People with substance use disorders can get treatment through Medicaid, which reduces the cost burden on society.

[Related: Alaska’s Medicaid and public assistance backlog is 20K people deep]

Citing a recent study from the McDowell Group, Katie says, “When people are using alcohol and drugs, and impacted by addiction, there’s a huge cost. Billions of dollars to our state in loss, workforce productivity, accidents, health care consumption, you name it.”

The Department of Health and Social Services is working on ways to measure the cost-effectiveness of Medicaid expansion and reform. Katie says to figure out societal savings, you’d have to look to how many people kept their housing because they were mentally stable or stayed out of jail because they received addiction treatment.

Or kept a job- like Andi.

Andi’s healthier now. Her blood sugar is in check. She’s not on insulin anymore. She still struggles with some bills and helping her husband, who has a disability. But now, she can also have time for important things, like connecting with family through a love of sports. The Minnesota Vikings logo pops from her screensaver. She says she’s a big fan.

“My family’s from Minnesota, and it’s my way to connect with my family long distance,” she explains.

Want to hear more Solutions Desk stories? Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or NPR. Rate it to help others find it, too!

Sheldon Fisher, Gov. Bill Walker’s choice to be the commissioner of the Alaska Department of Revenue, had a confirmation hearing with the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday. He was appointed in September to replace Randall Hoffbeck, who resigned to return to religious ministry.

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Fisher said he supports diversifying the sources of revenue for the state. But he didn’t champion any individual tax during the hearing.

Fisher is the former Department of Administration commissioner and previously worked as an executive at McKinley Capital Management and Alaska Communications.

After the hearing, Fisher said the biggest source of new revenue should be a draw on Alaska Permanent Fund earnings.

“My ambition is to try to bring some degree of stability to Alaska, so that we can begin to see investment return to our state and put people back to work,” Fisher said.

Fisher said that if the Legislature approves a permanent fund draw plan, then it can return in the future to close the rest of the gap between state spending and revenue. That could occur through either new taxes or spending cuts.

Fisher said a plan to pay oil and gas tax credits by selling state bonds also would help investment in the state. Under Senate Bill 176, oil companies would have the option to take lower rates for the credits in return for receiving the cash sooner than they would under current state law.

“It’s a win for our budget, because we can reduce the amount of the obligation during the upcoming period,” Fisher said. “It’s a win for the producers because they can kind of clean up their balance sheet and get back to work. And it’s a win for Alaskans because it will be an infusion in our economy at a time when we need it.”

The Legislature hasn’t announced when it will vote on all of Walker’s appointees.

Karen Hamm is walking along the tide line at a popular beach on the Homer Spit, five gallon bucket in hand. She reaches down to collect chunks of coal. Some are pebble sized. Others are a large as a loaf of bread.

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Hamm says it’s not an ideal day to scavenge.

“It’s always better after a storm first of all,” Hamm said. “Secondly, the wind has to be coming from the west because if it’s coming from the east, it’s going to blow it out instead of in.”

Hamm would know. She’s been scavenging for coal with her husband for seven years. The coal that washes up on Homer beaches comes from veins in the bluffs that line Cook Inlet and overlook town. Boulder-size sections of coal break off the cliffs, are churned up in the ocean and wash onto area beaches in smaller pieces.

And Hamm needs about 9,000 pounds of coal to heat her home every winter. She and her husband typically drive onto the beach and fill the bed of their truck about nine times every year.

“You go to the beach, you get cold and you come home and stand next to the coal fire,” Hamm said.

Back at her home, Hamm pulls brick size pieces of coal from a trailer and brings them inside.

But before Hamm burns anything, she needs to empty out the ash box. She says it’s not exactly a clean fuel.

“There’s a lot more ash with coal than there is with wood,” Hamm said. “Not only that, but it gets in the air. It’s messy.. but it’s cheap. You can afford to hire a maid.”

Those savings drove Hamm and her husband George to ditch their wood stove and install a coal stove instead.

George Hamm, who is 80 years old, used to gather wood and says it would take about five cords to heat his 2,500 square foot home each year. He also supplements with heating oil when they’re not home.

“You can just figure if you burn 100 gallons of oil, you’re going to burn a cord of wood or you’re going to burn a ton of coal,” George Hamm said. “Those are not accurate figure, but it gives you a round figure to work with.”

No one knows exactly how many people burn coal in Homer, but it seems to be getting more popular, likely because it’s free. After a big winter storm, you can see a number of people on the beach collecting coal.

Karen Hamm says there’s been more competition on the beach recently.

“I think it has a lot to do with our economy right now,” Hamm said.

For Laura Upp, the economy was certainly a factor. She switched to a coal and wood burning stove about five years ago after wood became too expensive.

“Cords of wood, cut and split, for you are almost near $200 delivered anymore,” Upp said. “So, that’s a lot of money… if I was only burning wood, I would go through a cord of wood in a month.”

Upp still uses some wood and supplements with oil.

Both Hamm and Upp acknowledge that burning coal isn’t ideal. They worry about the air quality. But they say the savings and convenience drives them and others to the beaches.

“I think people are just trying to find cheaper alternatives,” Upp said. “I know it’s not the best thing for the environment, but right now, it’s just what I have to do.”

Upp says she would consider other options such as natural gas if it was available, but for the foreseeable future, she will continue beach combing for coal.

Alaska House lawmakers are on their third day of floor debate on the state’s operating budget.

They’ve taken up more than 70 amendments, mostly offered by Republicans in the minority caucus. They voted down all but three amendments so far.

At a press availability Thursday morning, House Minority Leader Charisse Millett said the debate is going smoothly.

“We’ve offered about 80 amendments this year,” Millett said. “We’re working through those in very good fashion with the House Democrats. Unfortunately, they’re not accepting any of our amendments. And that’s OK, the conversation is still good for Alaskans to hear and to understand our ideas on how we can reduce the size and footprint of government.”

Floor debate on the operating budget is expected to continue Thursday afternoon. Eventually, the budget bill will go to the Senate for deliberations.

The House has just recessed until the call of the chair. It is expected that the’ll return this afternoon. #akleg

— Gavel Alaska (@GavelAlaska) March 22, 2018

You can tune into Gavel Alaska’s live coverage on 360 North television, 360North.org and Gavel Alaska’s Facebook page.

Once again, Bethel hosted a meeting on how climate change is affecting the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Bethel hosts a lot of these meetings. Many say the same things: temperatures are warming and the weather, land and life is changing. The latest group on the scene hopes to advance this conversation by developing a plan to work with those who live in the region to find and implement ways to adapt and protect its resources.

In Stebbins this winter, residents burned their old fish racks and sheds for firewood. The sea ice that people were used to crossing to gather driftwood never formed, yet the cold had set in. Suddenly, knowing what had happened in the past no longer applied to the present. Mary Pete is originally from Stebbins and shared this story to show how climate change has challenged one of the region’s most valuable resources: traditional knowledge.

“The reality of climate change has made some of our knowledge problematic, or obsolete, or inapplicable,” Pete said.

For two days, local leaders from along the coast and Kuskokwim River met at the Cultural Center in Bethel to identify what resources are being threatened by climate change, what they want to protect and how they’re going to do that. Participants from the Yukon were weathered out and unable to make it.

The Western Alaska Landscape Conservation Cooperative and its consultants led the session. The group partners with entities throughout Western Alaska to conserve natural resources. The approach they took was an international model used around the world by indigenous populations to adapt to climate change. Ian Dutton helped start the model with an Aboriginal group in Australia a decade ago and has seen it work over time.

“It’s just extraordinarily heartening to go back into a place that 10 years ago was suffering from all sorts of social challenges and had a lot of environmental issues and is starting to build that healthy ecosystem approach that both people and the ecosystem depend upon,” Dutton said.

In Australia, Western farming practices had degraded the land. When local Aboriginals took over as co-managers, the land started healing and so did the community. Native plant and animal species returned. Youth suicide and incarceration decreased, and local jobs multiplied as co-management expanded.

“It’s not something that’s exogenous or comes from outside the community,” Dutton explained. “It’s actually something that comes from within the community and recognizes the expertise and skills that exists in those communities.”

Since then this model, called Healthy Communities, has traveled around the world to New Zealand, Canada and now Alaska.

The goal is to create a regional plan for adapting to climate change and protecting its valued resources.

For example, people value an undisturbed tundra. A threat to that is the unregulated use of ATVs, which can damage plants, increase erosion, scare off wildlife, and spread trash. A way to help that situation is to designate and fortify trails.

For everyone at the meeting, the stakes are personal. Megan Leary’s son is a year and a half old. Her family lives in Aniak on the Upper Kuskokwim, and meeting the kinds of goals in the Healthy Communities plan could allow him to live the lifestyle of his culture.

“I want him to be able to have that opportunity,” Leary said. “To go out some day when he’s older, or even now, and be able to harvest the things he needs to sustain himself [and] his family in the future.”

The meeting is the first in a series coming to the region on the issue.

Jeremy Johnson is an elections supervisor based in Fairbanks. He phoned the tribal office in Birch Creek, which has a population of 33 according to the 2010 census. There are 13 registered voters in the Gwich’in Athabascan community near the Yukon river. It’s too small to have a polling station and the only way that voters can get to the one in Fort Yukon is to fly, drive a snowmachine or dog team, ski there or take a boat when the river’s not frozen.

“They are so geographically isolated from the polling location,” Johnson said. “So that they are what we call ‘permanent absentee voting locations.’”

Under the terms of a Voting Rights Act court settlement, the state is required to provide Birch Creek with a bilingual elections outreach worker. The settlement requires the state to ask the tribal governments in specific communities to refer people who have the expertise to provide local indigenous language assistance. The state pays for the help, though the money’s not great.

Johnson doesn’t remember if it was Birch Creek or one of the other six small communities included in the court settlement that he made the call to a couple of years ago, but he remembers the answer that he got from the village tribal office.

“They said ‘Oh no no. We don’t need that. Everyone here speaks English,'” Johnson said.

Johnson could have documented his call and gone on with his other tasks, having met the letter of the law, but he really wanted to help the voters in the village. He just didn’t know how.

“So it behooves me to contact the school or call the tribe back, and then get another opinion,” Johnson said. “Sometimes it’s not possible to get that service.”

At this week’s Language Summit, held by the state Elections Division, Johnson was still looking for help and asking for referrals. He also presented the training program he provides and the translated material he uses. When he passed out the Gwich’in 2016 election pamphlet he hit another impasse. None of the three Athabascan and Gwich’in people at the conference could read it.

“I can’t read it,” Elva Ansaknok, from Fort Yukon, said. “I’m from Gwitchyaa. That’s the language I talk.”

Ansaknok understood the audio version of the material, and said that dialects are not a problem when she speaks with others.

“Yeah. We can have conversation really easy without knowing that we’re talking different dialects,” Ansaknok said.

Indra Arriaga is the Election Language Assistance Compliance Manager at the Division of Elections.

“These languages have always been oral,” Arriaga said. “From what I can see in history is you use that [not being able to read and write the language] as a way to suppress them, and that’s not what we want to do. So we’re doing both. We’re doing audio and we’re doing written as far as we can, but the priority in those villages is definitely the audio because they should not be punished because they come from a different tradition.”

Arriaga knows that her translators are experts in their languages, but meeting the legal requirements for a written ballot and election materials remains a problem. She remembers working with one person in the Koyukon Athabascan dialect two years ago. She asked her to write the translation down.

“She said, ‘I have never written it down.’ And I asked, ‘what would it take?’” Arriaga said.

It was the first time that the translator had tried to write her language. To do that work, she had to invent the spelling for words as best she could.

In some parts of the state like the Bethel region, an area of Alaska where the language is still strong and has the best chance of survival, Yup’ik linguists like Cecelia Martz and Marie Mead spent years working hard to write books and develop curriculum to make sure that the next generation of speakers learned to write the language as well as read it. That work has not been done throughout the state, leaving bureaucrats at the Division of Elections and the language experts working with them doing the best that they can.

Army officials have begun the years-long process of decommissioning Alaska’s first and only nuclear power plant, located at Fort Greely. The facility was built during the height of the Cold War, then shut down in 1972 after 10 years of on-and-off operation. Much of it was dismantled and disposed, the rest encased in concrete. And now, the Army Corps of Engineers plans to remove most or perhaps all of what’s left of the plant.

The Army built Fort Greely’s nuclear power plant, called the SM-1A, as part of an experimental program to determine if such facilities could be built and operated in remote sites more cheaply than diesel-fueled powerplants.

“The main approach was to reduce significant fuel-transportation costs by having a nuclear reactor that could operate for long terms with just one nuclear core,” Brian Hearty said. Hearty manages the Army Corps of Engineers’ Deactivated Nuclear Power Plant Program.

Hearty says the Army built the SM-1A in 1962 in hopes the facility could provide power reliably at remote radar sites around the Arctic that would scan the skies for incoming missiles from the Soviet Union – which at that time, was America’s archrival.

“Because of the Cold War, the Air Force and Army were looking at the potential for a lot of the defense radar sites to be located up there,” Hearty said in a telephone interview last week.

Hearty says the program worked. But maybe not in the way Pentagon officials had hoped. They learned the SM-1A could be built and operated in a cold and remote locale. And they discovered its upfront costs were much higher than anticipated, and that it costs more to maintain than a diesel power plant. But, he says, the program soon was no longer relevant, because of the Soviets’ advances in rocket science.

“One of the big things that shut down the program overall was the creation of the ICBMs that go up over the defense early-warning systems,” Hearty said.

So the SM-1A, built at a cost of about $17 million dollars, was shut down in 1972 after eight years of operation – it was out of commission from 1967 to 1969 for extensive repairs. Hearty says the plant was partially dismantled soon after it was deactivated.

“All of the fuel in the reactor core was removed and shipped back to the Atomic Energy Commission for them to either reprocess of dispose of,” Hearty said. “The highly activated control and absorber rods were also removed and shipped back to the AEC.”

The power plant produced 1.8 megawatts of electricity and 20 megawatts of thermal energy, including steam, which was used to heat the post. That part of the system was still needed, so Army officials removed most of the nuclear-power system and hooked the heat and steam components to a diesel-fired boiler. But they left several parts of the nuclear system in place, including the highly radioactive reactor pressure vessel and reactor coolant pumps.

“Those were either kept in place or they were cut off and layed down in the tall vapor-containment building there,” Hearty said. “And then they were grouted and concreted in place.”

That is what remains to be cleaned up, along with other remediation, in order for the SM-1A to be declared fully decommissioned. Hearty says the Corps of Engineers wants to remove all of the stuff, but he says it’s not yet known whether that’s feasible. Meanwhile, he says monitoring for radioactivity around the facility shows it remains at acceptably low levels.

“It would be safe to say there’s no threat to human health in the environment,” Brenda Barber project manager for the decommissioning, says.

Barber says it’s still in its early stages, and won’t be completed until 2026 at the earliest.

Barber says the Corps awarded $4.6 million contract in December to a Virginia-based firm to develop a long-range plan for the project. Among other things, that’ll help agency officials determine how much of the SM-1A will remain after it’s decommissioned.

“There will still be buildings there,” Barber said. “There will still be components of some of the old structure there that may likely remain.”

Barber says she and other officials working on the project visited the site in January. She says she and Hearty will be back in April to again meet with post officials, as well as members of a local community advisory board. And she says that’s when planning will begin in earnest for the final disposition of Alaska’s one and only nuclear power plant.

The U.S. House has passed a bill to keep the federal government funded for the rest of the fiscal year. It’s not expected to pass the Senate until the weekend, which will likely cause a brief government shutdown. The bill is a few thousand pages. Alaska Public Media Washington correspondent Liz Ruskin boils it down for Alaska listeners, with News Director Lori Townsend.

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RUSKIN: I want to start (by) telling you what’s not in the bill. And that is Tongass logging riders. We’ve been expecting for weeks that Sen. (Lisa) Murkowski would get a couple of provisions in this bill to support … continued logging in the Tongass National Forest. And those riders aren’t in the bill. We were expecting an exemption for the Tongass from the Roadless Rule. That’s not in the bill.

TOWNSEND: The Roadless Rule – remind us what that is.

RUSKIN: The Roadless Rule stems from the Clinton administration, the last days of the Clinton administration. Basically, it bans new road-building in (forests) that don’t have roads. But that continues to apply to the Tongass as it did before. Sen. Murkowski did not get an exemption in this spending bill for the Tongass.

Another thing she did not get is a block for the Tongass management plan that she does not like. We were expecting her to block that plan. It’s not in the bill.

TOWNSEND: That’s the transition to logging younger trees rather than old-growth, right?

RUSKIN: Yes exactly. And there’s not a block in the bill on that plan. But she did get an instruction … telling the Forest Service not to complete the transition until they complete a tree inventory to show that that there are enough young-growth (trees) to support the industry.

TOWNSEND: All right, a few thousand pages – what IS in the bill for Alaska.

RUSKIN: It doubles the funding for the Denali Commission, bringing it to $30 million. That’s interesting because the Trump administration had proposed to give the Denali Commission a 50 percent cut. And instead they’re getting a 100 percent increase.

And Sen. Murkowski office sent a press release that lists all kinds of other spending on national programs that Alaska benefits from. One of them is the Payment in Lieu of Taxes. That’s a program that supports local governments and compensates them for the federal lands near them that they can’t tax. So that’s called PILT – Payment in Lieu of Taxes. There’s a lot of money for water and wastewater systems in rural areas. And, she points out, a record spending (increase of $498 million) for the Indian Health Service.

And also, as Rep. Don Young points out in his press release, there’s almost $170 million for military construction at Eielson Air Force Base. That’s to prepare for the arrival of the F 35 squadrons.

TOWNSEND: Liz, does anything else stand out to you?

RUSKIN: Well, I did notice $150 million for a new icebreaker. It’s … another incremental step in the process of acquiring one or more new icebreakers, heavy icebreakers. Each one costs around a billion dollars, maybe a little less.

Transcript lightly edited for clarity

Traffic has been a major headache for thousands of Southcentral Alaska commuters due to a reroute of the Glenn Highway between the Matanuska-Susitna Borough and Anchorage.

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A tall load on a semi trailer collided with a highway overpass bridge on Wednesday, and damage to the bridge forced transportation officials to close the highway’s southbound lanes. Then the state’s busiest commute was detoured through Eagle River on Thursday, causing hours-long delays.

The fallout has prompted closures Friday for schools in Eagle River and Chugiak.

Anchorage police also announced later Thursday that a ramp off the highway is being converted to allow traffic around the damaged bridge without going through downtown Eagle River again. But police warned there would be one lane at that spot and likely still traffic congestion.

An average of 57,000 vehicles travel the Glenn Highway every day on a commute that’s usually less than one hour for most. Thursday morning’s commute funneled all of those drivers into Eagle River, choking the small community’s streets, and many drivers trying to get to Anchorage were stuck in their cars for five hours or more.

“Obviously, this is a huge inconvenience,” Shannon McCarthy, a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation, said.

McCarthy said the inconvenience is a necessary precaution, because pieces of the damaged bridge could still come off.

“That’s our main concern, is cars driving under it and potentially having the span fall,” McCarthy said.

A prefabricated building carried atop an 18-wheeler slammed into the bridge Wednesday, shearing off the top of the building and leaving splintered wood and chunks of concrete all over the highway. Photos of the semi indicate it is owned by Bighorn Enterprises. Calls to the Fairbanks-based trucking company went unanswered Thursday.

Police said the driver was uninjured and there are no early indications he or she was driving impaired or broke any traffic laws. But while DOT says the semi was permitted to carry an oversize load, the load was apparently too tall for the bridge and the damage was extensive.

“When our bridge inspectors were really able to get up there and look at it, what they really found is the whole thing was shattered, so the concrete is pulverized and it’s not holding any weight anymore,” McCarthy said. “And the most problematic part of it is that falling onto the southbound lanes.”

The bridge’s clearance is listed at a little over 18 feet, and McCarthy said the semi’s permit was for a load up to 17 feet tall. It’s unclear how tall the load actually was.

McCarthy said DOT is still looking into who is at fault in the accident and, ultimately, whether the shipping company might be held liable for the cost of repairing the bridge.

“It’s going to be an investigation,” McCarthy said.

To get the highway reopened, McCarthy said workers will first have to remove some concrete and a one hundred-ton steel girder on one side of the bridge. That could take three to five days. She said reinstalling a new girder will be done later and will involve shutting down the highway again.

“That’s going to be a longer project and when we do replace, we’re going to want to pick a time period that is low volume. And we’re going to have to do both the removal and replacement from on top of the bridge,” McCarthy said.

DOT has asked the state for an emergency appropriation of $1.8 million dollars for the total repair cost, McCarthy said.

Meantime, criticism of the detour route from drivers stuck in traffic for hours who were trying to get to jobs, appointments or to the airport was fierce. Anchorage police spokesperson M.J. Thim said the decision to route traffic through Eagle River was made in the interest of safety after the initial highway closure.

“It’s a small concentrated area, you’ve got a major highway, but outside of that, you’ve got residential roads and smaller roads, so the options were limited,” Thim said.

Not all of the reaction was negative, though. Posts on the Facebook group Glenn Highway Traffic Report showed someone dressed in a turtle costume running alongside backed up traffic faster than the cars were moving. A couple people also sat in lawn chairs offering moral support with a sign that read “Hang in there.”

Then there were young entrepreneurs like Alexis Sammartino and Lily O’Mara.

“We decided to start a hot chocolate and tea stand so people can buy it to pass the time,” Sammartino said.

“We’ve made seven dollars!” O’Mara said.

“We decided to split it equally,” Sammartino said.

“Fifty-fifty”

“Yeah, fifty fifty.”

Congress is set to approve a major increase in funding for Alaska villages threatened by climate change.

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The spending bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday would double the budget of the federal Denali Commission, which funds infrastructure in rural Alaska, to $30 million.

The new money is aimed at addressing “the most urgent needs” of Alaska villages facing “erosion, flooding and permafrost degradation,” according to instructions accompanying the bill.

Joel Neimeyer is the federal co-chair of the Denali Commission. He said virtually all the new money will go toward moving the village of Newtok, in Western Alaska.

The village is losing about 70 feet of land annually to coastal erosion, and residents worry it will be completely uninhabitable within a few years.

Newtok has been trying to move to a new site, Mertarvik, which is several miles away. Neimeyer said the new funding could finally break the logjam.

“We’re very excited that this $15 million will allow the community of Newtok to realize their dream of moving to Mertarvik,” Neimeyer said.

Newtok has been trying to piece together enough funding to move for more than a decade. But the village has found itself in a Catch-22: government agencies that fund housing won’t build homes where there’s no infrastructure. But agencies that fund infrastructure — like water, sewer or power — won’t spend money on a village where nobody lives.

The new money could break that cycle. The village plans to move used barracks from a military base in Anchorage and convert them into housing at the new site. Officials estimate moving the barracks will be significantly less expensive than building new homes, stretching out any funding.

“I would hope that this $15 million would get us halfway to where the community needs in terms of housing stock,” Neimeyer said. “That really is a real community. There are enough people living there that the other funding agencies will have to say, ‘that is a community and our money will be put to good use.’”

That would be a landmark moment for Newtok, and for the state of Alaska, which has not managed to move any of the coastal villages coping with erosion and climate change, despite years of work.

If Newtok can move successfully, Neimeyer said, it could be a model for other threatened villages, like Shishmaref, Shaktoolik or Kivalina.

“If we in Alaska can show Congress we can take their funds and put it to good use, and show that we can do this efficiently, effectively and smartly, perhaps that will open up the checkbook for the other communities,” Neimeyer said.

On Thursday, leaders in Newtok said they were not quite ready to talk about the funding. After years of waiting, they are holding off until the bill is officially passed into law.

The spending bill now goes to the U.S. Senate, which must pass it by Friday night to avoid triggering a partial government shut down.

Stories are posted on the APRN news page. You can subscribe to APRN’s newsfeeds via email, podcast and RSS. Follow us on Facebook at alaskapublic.org and on Twitter @aprn

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What’s in it for Alaska? Here are 6 things in the federal spending bill

Liz Ruskin, Alaska Public Media – Washington D.C.

The $1.3 trillion bill has many items of Alaska interest. But two things not in this bill are also of note.

Congress poised to approve $15M for village relocation in Alaska

Rachel Waldholz, Alaska’s Energy Desk – Anchorage

The spending bill would double the budget of the Denali Commission, which funds infrastructure in rural Alaska. The commission says virtually all the new money will go to relocating the eroding village of Newtok.

As bridge fix continues, Glenn Highway congestion could go on for days

Casey Grove, Alaska Public Media – Anchorage

A tall load on a semi trailer collided with a highway overpass bridge on Wednesday, and damage to the bridge forced transportation officials to close the highway’s southbound lanes. Then the state’s busiest commute was detoured through Eagle River on Thursday, causing hours-long delays.

ACLU sues city of Palmer over alleged unlawful immigrant arrest 

Zachariah Hughes, Alaska Public Media – Anchorage

A civil rights group is suing an Alaska police department over what it says was the unlawful arrest and detention of an immigrant last summer.

State budget largely unchanged after 3 days of amendments

Andrew Kitchenman, KTOO – Juneau

Minority caucus Republicans offered amendments that would cut $28 million, but none passed.

Feds take key step toward approving another Conoco development in NPR-A

Elizabeth Harball, Alaska’s Energy Desk – Anchorage

If it goes forward, the project would be ConocoPhillips’s third oil development inside the boundaries of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

Using wood to stay warm in Bethel

Christine Trudeau, KYUK – Bethel

More than 90 percent of households in Bethel use heating oil to keep warm, according to census data. But a lot of people supplement with wood, even though there are no trees on the tundra.

What it takes to respond to a mental health crisis

Anne Hillman, Alaska Public Media – Anchorage

If someone breaks their arm or twists an ankle, we generally know what to do – brace it and get help. But what if someone is hurting mentally instead of physically? A bandage won’t help, but a Mental Health First Aid class will.

The state budget is largely unchanged after three days of debate on the Alaska House floor.

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The House defeated more than 40 amendments and passed four. One amendment added $211,000 for rural emergency response.

Minority caucus Republicans offered amendments that would cut $28 million, but none passed.

A series of amendments intended to put limits on the Alaska Gasline Development Corp. were also defeated.

One offered by Wasilla Republican Rep. David Eastman would have shifted money from AGDC to state pension funding.

While many Republican lawmakers have criticized Gov. Bill Walker’s handling of the gas line, only five House members voted for Eastman’s amendment.

Nikiski Republican Rep. Mike Chenault voted against it.

“If we continue to be afraid to make that investment to get to a point where we see if we have a viable project or not, in 30 years we’ll be saying the same thing we’re saying today, is that: ‘We should have went forward and completed a project,’” Chenault said.

There are still many amendments that haven’t been debated. They include expected amendments to restore full funding for Alaska Permanent Fund dividends.

The federal government has taken a key step in the permitting process for a new oil development in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, west of Prudhoe Bay.

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The Bureau of Land Management today released a draft environmental impact statement for the Greater Mooses Tooth 2 project, or GMT2. If it goes forward, GMT2 would be ConocoPhillips’s third oil development inside the boundaries of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

“This [environmental impact statement] will help us look at the best way to develop this project, and it’s a really important step in developing on the North Slope,” Conoco spokeswoman Natalie Lowman said.

For Conoco, the permitting process for GMT2 has taken much longer than expected. The company is now aiming for first oil in 2021, a year later than it originally planned. But the company now thinks the project is back on track.

“We believe that permitting is now proceeding on a reasonable schedule,” Lowman said.

Lowman said the $1.5 billion project could produce up to 30,000 barrels of oil per day.

The project would be west of the Village of Nuiqsut. The BLM says potential impacts to Nuiqsut and its subsistence resources will be “of particular interest” as it weighs permitting the development.

Those impacts “may result from hunter avoidance of the area, changes in access to subsistence use areas, resource (particularly caribou) availability, community participation in subsistence activities, aircraft traffic, spills, and rehabilitation of infrastructure upon abandonment,” the agency states in the draft environmental impact statement.

In the document, BLM notes Conoco has taken steps to mitigate impacts to subsistence resources. The agency will take public comments on Conoco’s proposal until May 7.

A civil rights group is suing an Alaska police department over what it says was the unlawful arrest and detention of an immigrant last summer.

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On Thursday, the Alaska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint in state court on behalf of Palmer resident Andres Alexander Caceda-Mantilla. Court documents detail an incident at Klondike Mike’s Saloon last August, when Caceda-Mantilla was badly beaten by three individuals after rushing to the defense of a bartender.

In an eight-minute video released by the ACLU that includes police body-camera footage, members of the Palmer Police Department show up in response to the brawl and handcuff the assailants. But not long after Caceda-Mantilla tells them he is from Peru and has only a passport as documentation, they detain him.

The court filing says that Detective Kristi Muilenberg told a police dispatcher to call Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and eventually handcuffed Caceda-Mantilla, placing him in the back of a police car as he continued bleeding from a head wound that eventually required eight stitches.

“Even if you didn’t commit a crime, it’s something that the department of Homeland Security wants,” Muilenberg can be heard saying in the footage. “It’s a federal thing.”

At the heart of the ACLU complaint is whether or not it was lawful for Caceda-Mantilla to be put under arrest and detained for four days by Palmer police when there was no evidence he’d committed a criminal offense.

As it is laid out under Alaska’s legal code, state and local police are not in charge of enforcing immigration violations, according to ACLU communications director Casey Reynolds.

“Police officers do not have legal authority to arrest any one just for being undocumented, being undocumented is not a crime, it’s a civil violation,” Reynolds said by phone Thursday. “Under Alaska law, in order for police to arrest anyone they have to have belief that a crime has occurred. So it was an unlawful arrest.”

Caceda-Mantilla is married to a U.S. citizen, though had not started filing for a visa or green card at the time of the incident. He was eventually released by ICE.

According to the ACLU, all three of the men who assaulted Caceda-Mantilla were released by officers at the scene.

The suit seeks damages, saying Caceda-Mantilla experienced psychological harm, along with physical injuries that were made worse as a result of being handcuffed and detained.

The lawsuit names the City of Palmer as a defendant along with the four individual members of the police department involved in the incident: Kristi Muilenberg, Jamie Hammons, Daniel Potter and Hilary Schwaderer.

ACLU’s Reynolds said the move was meant to send a message to law enforcement across the state.

“At the end of the day it’s the individual police officers who make the decision whether to take somebody into custody or not, so we’re holding the people who actually committed the unlawful arrest accountable,” Reynolds said.

The city of Palmer has not yet responded to the complaint. Attorney Michael Gatti represents the city of Palmer and said Thursday he was still reviewing the court documents.

More than 90 percent of households in Bethel use heating oil to keep warm, according to census data. But a lot of people supplement with wood, even though there are no trees on the tundra.

And then there’s Jeff Sanders, who exclusively heats his 3,000-square-foot home in Bethel with wood he scavenges around town. Sanders says he hasn’t used heating fuel since 1974.

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The Cost of Cold is a series from Alaska’s Energy Desk about how Alaskans around the state heat their homes. Reporter Christine Trudeau produced this story from Bethel.

The 2018 Cama-i Dance Festival was dedicated to six elders from the tundra village of Kasigluk. The elders revived Yup’ik dance in the village and serve as the foundation of the community’s dance tradition today. The community is working to never need a revival again.

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It is tradition in Yup’ik dance for the men to sit in the back, drumming and singing, and for the boys to kneel in the front, dancing. Between them, the women and girls dance standing up. But during Kasigluk’s second song at Cama-i, tradition flipped. The men handed their drums to the boys, and the boys handed their dance fans to the men. As the men knelt, the boys began singing and drumming.

The next generation was now in charge.

“When I was growing up, there was no dancing in our schools in our village,” 65-year-old Marie Hoover said.

Hoover was a bilingual teacher in Kasigluk in the 1980s when the renaissance of Yup’ik dance began in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. But because the tradition had been largely erased by missionaries and BIA schools, few remembered how to do it. Fortunately, those few had started a dance group in Bethel, and Kasigluk invited those dancers to their village to teach them the tradition again.

The elders in Kasigluk who learned the dances are the ones to whom Cama-i 2018 is dedicated: Kalila Slim, Nellie Slim, Wassille Berlin Sr., Wassillie Nicholas, Alexy Nicholas and Pavilla Nicholas.

Gary Beaver leads Kassiglurmiut, the Kasigluk Community Dance Group. In fact, Beaver helped start the group. When he was young, Kasigluk’s only dance groups were in the schools. The six elders were the teachers. Beaver remembers refusing to sing and one of the elders, Kalila Slim, getting in his face.

“I wasn’t really into it,” Beaver said. “And all of a sudden, he [Slim] ran across the room, looked at me, and said, ‘You’re going to teach the next generation. You better start singing.’”

Once Beaver graduated, there was nowhere outside the school to dance. Then, that group of elders who had taught him started dying. Within a few years in the early 2000s, all six were gone and once again, dancing in Kasigluk stopped.

“Our tradition, the Eskimo dancing, I didn’t want it to just die off,” Beaver explained.

Beaver knew that the elders had recorded their songs on cassette tapes. He went to the school and asked a teacher if he could borrow them.

“He put them right in front of me,” Beaver remembered. “And said, ‘Go, and don’t come back until you learn them.’”

It wasn’t easy. The tapes were old, and friends and former classmates had to huddle over the recorder to make out some of the words.

“Using the old tapes, that’s what got it to click,” Beaver said. “Flashbacks, and we remembered it did this, and then we agreed, ‘oh yeah.’”

Beaver and his friends asked the village if they could start a community dance group so that they could continue dancing, so that dancing could carry past graduation, and so that all the generations could dance together. You already know their answer.

“At first we were mostly adults, but then the youth started showing up. Couple of youth, five of them, eight of them, 10 of them, 15 of them,” Beaver said, growing more excited. “They started showing up, and we were like, ‘Yeah! We’re so glad they’re doing it.’”

Some nights in Kasigluk up to 60 people show up to dance together. Ages range from infant to elder. At Cama-i, the group filled the stage.

“It falls into the theme of Cama-i: Drums Awaken Our Roots. Our elders passed away, and then the next generation took over, and now our future generation is taking over,” Beaver said. “So it’s better to teach them young, while we can, while they’re smarter. So they can have those songs in their heart.”

This week we’re hearing from Vanessa Duhrsen in Anchorage. Duhrsen is a senior at West High and recently received a Prudential Spirit of Community Award for her volunteer service throughout rural Alaska.

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DUHRSEN: I’m a tribal member of the Chippewa Cree tribe of the Rocky Boy’s Reservation in Montana, so that’s a huge part of my identity. Something my mom always says to me is “You are your ancestor’s wildest dreams.” And so that is really a key part of who I am. And I’m so fortunate to be where I am today because I know that the people before me and my ancestors, they’ve overcome so many different challenges. And so, I really am just the product of their effort.

I have been involved with a program called Skiku for a while now. So, Skiku sends teams of coaches to around 50 rural Alaska villages with the intent of forming sustainable ski communities. But the problem is that these coaches can only go for a week.

And so with that, I developed a program called Skiku Schoolmates. I set up housing, and I formed a relationship with the local school. And so, really we’re just prepared… so one person can live there for a while and form the connections that they needed to to make that happen. It’s more than about just skiing. It’s about physical health and mental health, and just forming greater community ties. I think skiing can do a lot of that. It’s a very multi-various sport.

I was raised off of my reservation and my mom talks a lot about the systematic oppression of indigenous people all around the world, so that is a huge part of my upbringing. And so, when I went to Hooper Bay, I did get to see that, and it kinda just put a real tangible experience to these things that my mom tells me all the time. Even though it’s not my culture, I felt a lot more connected to it afterwards. Because there was physical, tangible… it was like a real experience about this is what life is like for people who live on their Native land. This is what it’s like. It wasn’t just my mom’s words anymore. It was real.

As an indigenous person myself, that’s when I really realized how connected all indigenous people are around the world. All these different indigenous communities face a lot of the same challenges. I mean, I know they’re unique, but success for any indigenous culture is success for everybody, I think.

The Juneau School Board is considering adopting new curriculum for middle and high schools — based on growing national science standards. The model has been adopted entirely in 19 states, and one of the core ideas is teaching students about climate change.

The standards don’t shy away from attributing it to an increase of human activity. But how that’s taught in the classroom could be up to interpretation.

In the past five years, the way that science is taught in the classroom — across the nation — has shifted. Pop quizzes are still a thing, but the Next Generation Science Standards challenge students to think systematically.

“You still have the content there, but the focus has changed,” Ted Wilson said. He helped oversee the new curriculum for the Juneau School District, which includes activities that encourage place-based learning.

Another key part of the science standards is that students graduate with an understanding of earth and human activity, and that includes learning about climate change. The standards don’t mince words: What caused climate change to accelerate? It’s us.

The Juneau School District is borrowing some core ideas from the new standards.

But Wilson says how those ideas are taught in the classroom is up to the teachers. There’s no school district policy on climate change. Wilson’s advice is to stick to “it’s happening.”

“The aspect of how much of it is human-caused — because there is still a lot of controversy about that — is to teach it as this is one stream of thought,” Wilson said.

One stream of thought, Wilson says, that humans contributed to our most recent climate change.

“To present it like that,” Wilson said. “And for students to come away with their own opinions whether they think humans have made that impact or not.”

But Glenn Branch, a deputy director at the National Center for Science Education, says there are clear facts about who’s causing climate change to ramp up. His nonprofit advocates for evidence-based science in the classroom.

Branch says there’s a social controversy over climate change. But there isn’t a scientific one.

Scientists all over the world have studied this. And the overwhelming majority have reached the same conclusion: humans are largely to blame. It’s not an opinion, Branch says. It involves climate models and math.

Branch says that doesn’t leave room for avoiding the facts or debating them.

“It’s inappropriate,” Branch said. “Both because it reinforces a false conception that there’s a legitimate scientific debate about climate change, and also because it misrepresents the nature of science.”

Still, Branch says states are trying to navigate this all across the country. With topics that can be perceived as controversial, like climate change, he says it’s understandable school districts don’t want to make waves.

Branch says there are social issues that can be debated, like carbon taxes. However:

“You certainly don’t have it about issues such as human impact on climate change or the shape of the earth,” Branch said.

But Ted Wilson doesn’t take issue with climate change being presented in the classroom like a debate. Has human activity accelerated it or not? He says that regularly happens in history class or language arts.

Where does Wilson draw the line? Would flat earth theory be something he’d consent to someone teaching in a science classroom?

“As far as something that they’re asking students to debate, they could,” Wilson said.

Bottom line, Wilson says, is students should be able to think critically. And then decide on their own how to interpret the world, whether it’s flat earth theory or climate change. Regardless of what’s accelerating warming, how can we adapt? That’s the takeaway, he says.

“I think in our political climate, we don’t want teachers to be seen as people that are trying to push an agenda,” Wilson said.

Teaching students about climate change is part of the state’s science standards. But a spokesperson from the Alaska Department of Education says it’s largely up to the school districts to decide how that’s done.

Next year, the department will be able offer some new guidance. The state is currently updating its science standards. After being reviewed by teachers, parents and industry, it will be posted for public comment in 2019.