I bring stories from the community into the KTOO newsroom so that all of our reporting matters. I want to hear my community’s struggles and its wins reflected in our coverage. Does our reporting reflect your experience in Juneau?
Since this spring, we’ve been following along as the biggest cruise season in Juneau’s history got canceled. In August, Juneau did see some cruise visitors after all. But it was a far cry from the 1.4 million visitors we were expecting — it was 36 to be exact.
The first and only cruise ship to sail in Southeast Alaska during the pandemic left Juneau on Aug. 1st and returned to Juneau just four days later, after a passenger on the ship received a call that he had tested positive for COVID-19.
The low pressure system that brought heavy rain and wind over the weekend is slowly making its way out of the Juneau area.
An areawide flood watch from the National Weather Service was canceled early Monday morning, but a flood advisory remains in effect until 11:00 p.m. for the Mendenhall Lake and River. Flood stage for the lake is 9.0 feet. It’s expected to crest Monday afternoon at around 11.0 feet. At this water level, the Mendenhall Campground will be significantly flooded and evacuated. Homes along View Drive could be flooded and the road itself will be impassable. Skaters Cabin Road will be covered with water and portions of the West Glacier Trail will be impassable.
Wes Adkins with the National Weather Service calls this storm a “10-year event.” Between 2 – 4 inches of rain fell in the Juneau area on Sunday and Monday.
“It’s been a crazy wet summer. We are in line to potentially compete for records all time. I know we’re probably in the top 10 at this point,” Adkins said. “The ground is very saturated.”
The National Weather Service Juneau is forecasting widespread rain showers to continue throughout the day Monday. The southerly winds could keep gusting up to 40 miles per hour in the morning but decrease to 15 to 20 miles per hour in the afternoon.
The storm brought unusually strong winds to Southeast Alaska for early August. On Sunday, the National Weather Service in Juneau reported a 54-mile-per-hour gust at the Alaska Marine Line Dock in Juneau and a 51-mile-per-hour gust at the Juneau airport.
This story has been updated to reflect a new flood warning for the Mendenhall Lake and River.
Updated post
The first and only cruise ship to sail in Southeast Alaska during the pandemic is back in Juneau, just four days after departing the capital city. On Tuesday, a passenger on the ship received a call that he had tested positive for COVID-19.
The Wilderness Adventurer, operated by Uncruise, left Juneau for a weeklong trip on Saturday. The company had taken a lot of precautions, and its COVID-19 safety plan had been approved by the state.
According to Uncruise CEO Dan Blanchard, all passengers were required to get tested for COVID-19 up to five days before traveling to Alaska and boarding the boat.
But on the third morning of the trip, the ship was anchored in a cove somewhere in the wilderness of Southeast Alaska. Blanchard says most of the guests were off the boat exploring, and some of them had cell phone service.
“And our guest received a call from a testing facility in Juneau, run by the state of Alaska, that their second test had come back positive,” he said.
The passenger, from the Lower 48, was tested four days before flying to Juneau and had arrived with a negative test result in hand, the company said. It was a second test, done at the Juneau airport, that showed he was positive.
The guest notified the boat’s captain, who contacted the authorities. Then the company’s response plan went into effect. All passengers were quarantined in their cabins until the ship returned to Juneau.
In a Wednesday morning call with reporters, Blanchard said most of the Wilderness Adventurer’s guests arrived in Juneau the same day the trip departed. The passenger who tested positive arrived by plane some time before noon.
Uncruise rented out the Hangar ballroom — a private dining room at a local restaurant — to use as an “isolation area” prior to guests boarding the ship. This passenger was there by 3:00 or 3:30 p.m. on Saturday afternoon.
“Now this fellow did go out on the boardwalk and took a walk. And we know he dropped off some mail. And that’s what I know,” Blanchard said. “I don’t know any more details as far as where he went. That’s in the state’s hands right now.”
The vessel was back in Juneau by 7:30 Wednesday morning, and the ship’s 36 passengers are now checked-in to a local hotel for quarantine. The 30 crew members will quarantine on the vessel.
The state’s health department will advise the company on the quarantine, which Blanchard says could last anywhere from five days to two weeks.
The person who tested positive, along with his immediate travel companions, were tested on board, and those tests are off to the lab. Blanchard says the ship was carrying enough COVID-19 saliva test kits to test everyone on board twice.
No one on the ship has shown any signs or had any symptoms of an infection.
“I can tell you that the guests are bummed but understanding,” Blanchard said. “They’ve had four fabulous days truly.”
Blanchard says all guests will receive a credit for a future trip with Uncruise. But those vouchers won’t be good until next year.
The other four sailings the company had planned for the summer in Alaska have been canceled. Blanchard said that decision was a combination of what happened on this trip, plus the fact that the state recently changed its requirements for out-of-state travelers. Starting next week, Alaska will require travelers to have a negative test within three days of leaving home. Most test results take at least that long.
“So, the challenge for a guest is ‘Am I going to take off on the plane from the East Coast without having a test?’ And quite frankly, we don’t want to put the guests in that position,” Blanchard said.
Uncruise had tried to reimagine what travel in Southeast Alaska could look like in the face of a pandemic.
“Probably the two things that could have changed this situation. One is obvious: a vaccine. But the other is rapid testing,” he said.
Hopefully one of those two things will be available in 2021, and Uncruise will try again.
Original post
The first and only cruise ship to sail in Southeast Alaska during the pandemic reported a positive case of COVID-19 on board Tuesday.
The Wilderness Adventurer, operated by Uncruise, left Juneau on a weeklong trip Saturday.
According to Uncruise CEO Dan Blanchard, all passengers were required to get tested for COVID-19 up to five days before traveling to Alaska and boarding the boat.
A passenger from the Lower 48 was tested four days before flying to Juneau and had arrived with a negative test result in hand, the company said. It was a second test at the Juneau airport that showed the passenger was positive.
The state of Alaska called the passenger with the test result on Tuesday. The boat was in a wilderness area at the time, but some passengers had cell phone reception. All passengers were then quarantined in their cabins until the ship returned to Juneau Wednesday morning.
In a Wednesday morning call with reporters Blanchard said most of the Wilderness Adventurer’s guests arrived in Juneau the day of the trip. The passenger who tested positive arrived in Juneau some time before noon, he said. Uncruise rented out a private dining room at a local restaurant to use as an “isolation area” prior to guests boarding the ship. This passenger was there by 3:00 or 3:30 on Saturday afternoon, according to Blanchard.
The vessel returned to Juneau Wednesday morning and by 7:30 a.m. the first batch of the ship’s 36 passengers were checked-in to a local hotel for quarantine. The 30 crew members will quarantine on the vessel.
The person who tested positive, along with their immediate travel companions, were tested on board and those tests are off to the lab, the company said. The ship was carrying enough COVID-19 saliva test kits to test everyone on board twice.
Testing of all passengers might not happen immediately. The testing protocol is sometimes to wait for the viral load of infected people to increase for a few days in order to ensure a positive result from an infected person.
The trip was scheduled to depart and return to Juneau and not scheduled to stop in any communities.
Uncruise has canceled the four other sailings it had scheduled for this summer in Alaska. The state’s travel mandate for out-of-state visitors requires a negative test result within three days of departing for Alaska and it will not be testing out-of-state travelers at the airport for free. Blanchard says those changes went into his decision to cancel the other trips.
This story has been updated with more information from the company.
There’s going to be an Alaska cruise season after all, but it’s a far cry from the 1.4 million passengers that were expected before the pandemic hit.
Over the weekend, the Wilderness Adventurer, a 60-passenger boat, left Juneau on a weeklong trip. There will be four more trips just like it this summer. After that, the next sailing of any kind isn’t on the books until 2021.
It’s not just a little bit ironic that the lone company doing ship-based trips from Juneau this year is called Uncruise.
Back in April — when the first cruise ship of the season should have arrived in Juneau — the season had been pushed back to at least July, but hundreds of thousands of passengers still had tickets for those trips. For a small company like Uncruise, so much was up in the air that CEO Dan Blanchard couldn’t even comment.
But over the past 3 months he came up with a plan, and now Uncruise’s ship the Wilderness Adventurer is the only one sailing this year at all. It’s doing five cruises, starting and ending in Juneau. The first one is set to leave Saturday evening. And Blanchard says he’s anxious.
“I always feel a little anxious the date the first boat goes out, whether it’s in April or on August 1,” he said. “And you know, back when there were four or five other small ship companies that were going to be here locking arms with us, it was a little easier. But now, as we’re the only one and you’re in the spotlight, that kind of builds its own anxiety.”
Blanchard is wearing an Uncruise-branded face mask, just like the ones they’ll issue to all of their passengers.
There’s plenty of mitigation in place. Each trip this summer will have 37 guests max. That’s more than a 40% reduction from normal. All passengers have to get tested for COVID-19 before they come to Alaska. And they’ve been asked to book their flights for the same day the ship leaves.
There will be temperature checks for everyone on the boat, every day. There will be no buffets. And most of the meals this summer will get boxed up to-go rather than served in a dining room.
Uncruise has always done things differently from other cruise lines. They’re high end, with customers who want trips focused on adventure and wilderness. Passengers get off the boat to go birding or to watch bears eating salmon or to go sea kayaking in front of a glacier.
“Our whole thing is be safe by not only good COVID practices, but get out in the wilderness in small groups and socially distance in small groups,” said Blanchard. “So to do that, we brought on extra expedition staff, even though our numbers are greatly reduced.”
Uncruise isn’t the only small ship operator in Alaska. There were others trying to pull off what Blanchard is doing this summer. But ultimately, the city assemblies of port communities in Southeast Alaska couldn’t get on the same page about what they would, or could, require of these companies. And many of them canceled their seasons.
So Uncruise decided its trips would only dock in Juneau and make other stops in uninhabited places.
“In those early assembly meetings, the community was very concerned about, a boat goes out and visits four or five small towns and then comes back, and what’s the potential there?” he said. “And so we were, we saw that writing on the wall and realized ‘Well, you’re talking about what we are!’”
In other words, Uncruise and its flexible itineraries are built for social distancing.
It wasn’t hard to find customers. Lots of Uncruise passengers still wanted to do their Alaska dream vacations this summer.
Blanchard says he only had to issue refunds to 13% of his customers this year. The rest are either booked on these 5 trips or took vouchers for 2021.
Back in April, Blanchard — like everyone else — wasn’t looking very far into the future. Now he’s starting to make plans, not just for the rest of this season and not just for 2021, but for a future where he knows the tourism industry will have been transformed by this pandemic.
“If I were reading the writing on my crystal ball, I would say that there’s going to be more demand for small vessels like ours under 100 passengers, not less,” he said.
But for now, it’s still one day at a time. Juneau’s only sunny spell of the summer is about to come to an end, so at least the few hundred passengers that come this year will get to experience Juneau’s infamous weather.
In the summer of 2019, KTOO commissioned a source audit, or a report on the make-up of the sources we use for KTOO news stories and the guests we have on Juneau Afternoon.
Last October, we started asking everyone who appeared in a news story or was a guest on Juneau Afternoon to identify their gender and race and/or ethnicity.
Here’s what our first report in late 2019 revealed about who we’ve been interviewing. And here’s what the first quarter of 2020 showed us.
We’ve just finished compiling our third report, which reflects a period in which the COVID-19 pandemic was wholly present in Alaska.
For the period from April 1 through June 30, 2020:
Our goal here is obvious: include more female and non-binary voices. And it appears that we’re moving in the wrong direction.
For the previous six months (October 2019 – March 2020), 46% of our sources identified as male. For the last three months, that shot up to 60%.
One thing to consider is that in June, Juneau Afternoon went to a summer schedule with fewer programs and fewer guests. That program consistently has more female guests and balances out the news team’s tendency to interview more males.
To understand the difference between the guests on Juneau Afternoon and sources for news stories, it’s helpful to look at the subject experts we’re inviting to speak with us.
For news stories we talk to a lot of government officials, while Juneau Afternoon guests tend to be from the non-profit sector or artists or educators.
One trend I’m particularly interested in is the percentage of “general public” we include on our airwaves, especially since we know there’s an equal opportunity to talk to a man or a woman when things like expertise, educational background or profession don’t dictate why we’re talking to someone. For both Juneau Afternoon and our news stories, this is trending up — which is a result of an intentional effort to talk to more “regular people” about the pandemic and how it is impacting our community.
While 69% of Juneau’s residents identify as white-only, 79% of KTOO’s total sources for the past three months were white-only. And over the past nine months, the percentage of white-only sources in our coverage hasn’t changed much. (When we looked at this data in December, 75% of sources were white-only; in March, that number was 77%).
The two groups we have actively been trying to hear more from are people who identify as Alaska Native and Asian. If the goal is to reflect our community, these numbers should be 18% and 10% respectively. In total, we’re not there yet, but the make-up of Juneau Afternoon guests got very close (20% Alaska Native and 8% Asian).
One important factor we look at when we look at the racial and ethnic make-up of our sources is the focus of the story. The mix changes when the story or program has a focus on race.
Not surprisingly, stories that are not about race skew whiter than stories that address race. But this is not what we want our coverage to look like. We want a wide diversity of voices in every story we tell and every topic we cover.
One thing we did see in the last three months was an increase in stories and programs that were focused on race. In the last report, we only talked to two sources for stories that were primarily about race; for this reporting period, there were eight.
Documenting this information about our sources for these past nine months has been a mostly observational exercise. “Tracking our sources” (which isn’t as big brother as it sounds) is just holding up a mirror to our coverage so what we see is a true reflection of the everyday decisions we make when we decide to interview someone.
So far we haven’t been prescriptive about trying to change things. We know in general what we need to do but we haven’t decided on what levers to start pulling to try and start moving things around. That’s about to change. Without making a concerted effort to include more women and non-binary voices and more Black, Indigenous and Asian perspectives and experiences in our stories, we can’t expect these numbers to change.
This is our newsroom mission, which feels very aspirational right now:
Relying on voices, perspectives and stories historically underserved by news outlets, KTOO News provides information our community needs to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and our role in local, statewide and national issues and events.
Here are some stories and programs from the past three months where I feel like we have kept our mission in our sights. Hopefully we’ll have more of these to share at the end of the next quarter and we’ll see our numbers start to shift.
There is a flood warning in effect for the Mendenhall Lake and River.
Water from Suicide Basin has been flowing over the top of an ice dam since Monday, but now a large volume of water is draining under the glacier and will cause the Mendenhall Lake and River to rise over the next 24 hours, cresting Friday evening.
The National Weather Service issued a flood warning at 8:15 p.m. on Thursday through 10 a.m. Saturday morning. Officials are advising residents who live along the river to stay away from the river bank and be “prepared to take action.”
Flood stage on the river is 9 feet. The National Weather Service expects the river to crest Friday at about 10.2 feet, but that forecast could change.
At just over 9 feet, water covers Skaters Cabin Road between the cabin and the West Glacier Trailhead and begins to flow into Mendenhall Campground.
At 9.4 feet, there will be minor flooding along View Drive. At 10 feet, the weather services says the Mendenhall Campground will be under three feet of water in some places.
During past flood events, the City and Borough of Juneau has recommended that residents living along the Mendenhall River corridor have evacuation plans in place and cautioned people to be careful around the lake and glacier and to stay away from flooded areas and bridges over the Mendenhall River.
Glacial dam releases — known as a jökulhlaups — from Suicide Basin have become annual events in Juneau in recent years due to warming temperatures and the retreat of the Mendenhall Glacier.
