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In much of the world, the Christmas season continued into the new year, with Eastern Orthodox Christians overseas and in the United States celebrating on Jan. 7. In Sitka, St. Michael’s Cathedral hosted its annual Nativity service on Saturday, featuring a divine liturgy and choral music — with lyrics in Lingít, Aleut and Yup’ik as well as Latin.
KCAW’s Meredith Redick brings us this audio postcard, featuring the voices of Father Ishmael Andrew and choral director KathyHope Erickson.
Wind power may be the best option to add extra “oomph” to Sitka’s electric grid, based on research collected as part of an investigation into Sitka’s long-term energy needs.
Amy Solana and Molly Grear are engineers with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. They presented their findings to the assembly on Dec. 13. The study was funded with a federal grant the city scored from the United States Department of Energy. Sitka was one of a handful of communities nationwide selected to participate in the ETIPP program — that stands for Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership — which seeks to help remote and island communities increase their energy resilience.
Solana said that of all of the options — wind, solar, tidal and geothermal — wind is expensive but cost-effective enough in the long term that it would bring the biggest bang for the city’s buck.
“The wind resource is the strongest resource that there is available, is what we found,” she said. “There were several locations that we assessed throughout this project, and Beaver Lake and Lucky Chance are the locations that are shown here to be the most favorable as far as wind production goes.”
Solana said it could take around four years for the city to set up a wind project, which could generate up to 24 megawatts of power. She said solar energy would be quicker to set up, but the payoff is more limited because it would be most useful in the summer months, on large south-facing rooftops.
She also said there was potential to source wave and tidal energy, which would prove more useful than solar energy in the winter months but would be smaller in scale than a wind power project.
There’s also geothermal energy from Goddard Hot Springs, which was last investigated as a potential energy source in the 1980s.
“And what was found is that it looked promising, but really [an] additional detailed investigation is needed to characterize the resource, to understand what the capacity is,” Solana said. “And if it’s really feasible, what that detailed assessment means is drilling a well to understand what the heat flow is below the surface.”
So why look into this, when Sitka is still paying off a multi-million dollar hydroelectric dam project? The city is expecting more electric customers to jump onto the grid in the next five-to-ten years. With the construction of the new hospital on the SEARHC campus and continued migration toward electric cars, the city would either need to rely more on diesel generation to supplement the energy from the dam or find an alternative energy source.
“As electrification continues with electric vehicles and homes and buildings, switching from fossil fuel heating to heat pumps,” Solana said, “that’s a huge growth and load that really needs some some planning now.”
The full ETIPP report will be published in January. You can view Solana and Grear’s presentation slides here.
Sitka’s planning department will investigate whether several sections of city and state-owned land can be opened up for housing development.
Finding solutions to Sitka’s housing shortage is a goal of both the city’s comprehensive and strategic plans. At a recent Sitka Planning Commission meeting, Planning Director Amy Ainslie highlighted tracts of municipal land that might be good for housing development. Ainslie said she focused on large swaths of land that are close to existing power and water connections.
“As we have found in all of our other studies, the farther you are away from utility infrastructure, the more expensive the cost is going to be,” Ainslie said. “And if the goal is affordable housing, then obviously having high utility expenses…contravenes the whole goal, right?”
Ainslie said a large section of city-owned land behind Sitka High School is at the top of the list. She said the city should also consider state-owned land through the Indian River Valley.
“I think it’s an area worth exploring and with the current administration, there has been some interest in working with with municipalities to open state lands, in particular to give state lands to municipalities,” Ainslie said. “There’s a lot of focus on housing too. So I think it’s a good opportunity for us to be working with the state on this piece of land.”
Ainslie said there are three questions city staff need to answer in evaluating the land – whether it’s safe and buildable, how much housing can be built in the area and how much it will cost. To answer those questions, Ainslie said she’s budgeting for a study of the properties, which she hopes to kick off by the beginning of the next fiscal year, and fund through grants.
Commissioner Katie Riley said she was excited about the prospect of opening up more land for housing. But she noted that it doesn’t solve the immediate problem of affordable housing in Sitka.
“Houses are built. They’re sold to the folks who can afford them, which a lot of the times are not necessarily the folks that are looking for housing in town,” Riley said. “So having having a discussion, you know, amongst this body of what affordability is, what that means? I know that it’s a topic that we all hold a lot of different opinions on, and so I’m excited to explore that as well.”
During public comment, Sitka resident Martina Kurzer said she hoped that further down the line, developers would consider options beyond single-family homes. She recalled apartment buildings she saw on a recent trip to Juneau’s Auke Bay.
“I saw three buildings that were very attractive…overlooking the harbor there,” Kurzer said. “And I was wondering, they have a lot more space than we do. But is that anything? Is there anything we could do? How could we change our thinking to make the best with the limited available space we have?”
Ainslie, the planning director, said in the new year the commission could hold a special session to seek more community feedback on the land and its potential for housing development.
A Sitka-based author has taken a detour into young adult fiction, and the diversion has paid off with a national award.
Brendan Jones will receive the Green Earth Book Award in a virtual ceremony on Dec. 7 from Delaware. The award has been presented for the last 18 years by the nonprofit Nature Generation for exceptional work in a genre now called “eco-lit,” or literature which explores ecological issues.
Jones’ new novel Whispering Alaska, was published last year by Penguin/Random House. Jones says the story about twin girls who move to an island in Alaska wasn’t his idea — it was suggested to him by an editor at Random House.
But the novel didn’t come together until Jones was living in the Russian Far East on a Fulbright scholarship.
“My agent called up and said, ‘Hey, listen, there’s a great editor out there, Beverly Horowitz,’” said Jones, “‘Would you be interested in writing a story about twins coming from Pennsylvania to Alaska?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know anything about, you know, young adult.’ And, Julian, my agent pointed out, ‘Well, you’re gonna have three of them – and specifically three girls, because you have three girls who are younger now.”
Jones says the work didn’t go easily at first.
“I wrote a manuscript and sent it to Beverly, and she said, ‘This is not good. Try again.’ And I did and I sent her one. And she said, ‘This is still not good. Try again. Start over.’ And I went to Siberia, and just had a couple of months on my own right before COVID started in March (2020). And I had some time alone. And I just really dropped into some sort of creative space and sent her one. And she said, ‘We can work with this.’”
Jones says writing during the pandemic informed the plot. In fact, Jones says his publisher believes that this is the first young-adult fiction to explore the impact of the pandemic on youth. In this case, the twin girls at the heart of the story have suffered the death of their mother, an emergency room doctor. And although they’re twins, a rare genetic twist means that they each have a unique experience of grief.
“So they’re grieving their mother’s loss, and they’re mirror twins. It’s this incredible thing where twins are actually mirrors of each other.,” he says. “So when their mother dies, they have very different ways of dealing with her death.”
Jones says thatWhispering Alaska is aimed at readers who are around age 12 and up – which in the publishing industry is known as “middle-grade.”
He’s recently returned to Sitka from a trip to Port Alexander, where he taught the book for a week, and he says that it’s been a great way to reach Alaskan kids. His plan is to take Whispering Alaska into other classrooms in Alaska, and into high school and university courses he’ll instruct in the coming year.
Jones has received high marks for his previous work: His debut novel The Alaskan Laundry won the 2017 Alaskana Prize, and was recognized by Oprah’s Book Club.
A couple of Sitka residents who were fishing for halibut last month noticed an unusual feature on their depth sounder as they set gear a few miles north of town. Two-hundred feet below the surface of the water, the sounder slowly painted a picture of what appeared to be a volcano: A perfectly formed cone about 100 feet tall, with a plume of gas trailing from the top.
Experts who’ve seen the image say it is no cause for alarm. It’s most likely a mud volcano, and it’s not the only one near Sitka.
Locals don’t use rods and reels much to fish for halibut in Sitka. Most set a subsistence skate — a long line baited with a dozen or more hooks that is laid right along the bottom from a slow-moving boat.
Jacyn Schmidt was doing just this in November near the entrance to Nakwasina Sound, 5 miles north of Sitka. Schmidt was on deck, paying out the line.
“My friend who I was out fishing with was inside watching the depths on the sonar, and he noticed just a weird shape, and called me in to look at it with him,” she said. “I think we both immediately saw that cone shape and the kind of trail coming out of it, thinking that it could be an underwater volcano of a sort.”
Had it been anyone else, this might have been an invitation to head for the hills. But Schmidt is the regional geoscience specialist for the Tlingit and Haida Central Council. She’d been in Sitka for what has been an interesting year for the region, geologically.
Her first impulse was to try and find the feature again, and then get on the phone.
“I’m aware of the geologic context of Sitka and the surrounding islands,” said Schmidt, “and spatially where the Queen Charlotte Fault is and where the Mt. Edgecumbe Volcanic Field is, and this location was just not adding up with the story that I know about our geology here. And so I just called the people who I knew had spent a lot of time thinking about the seafloor here.”
“It’s a classic example of what we have seen out on the fault, down around Dixon entrance,” said Gary Greene, one of the people Schmidt called.
Greene is a marine geologist, emeritus professor at the Moss Landing Marine Labs, and a leading expert on the undersea geology of the Queen Charlotte Fault.
“These types of plumes that come out of this volcanic-like cone are associated with what what we call mud volcanoes,” said Greene. “They’re not really active volcanoes, where magma comes flowing out, but it’s mainly fluids that come up from depth and carry with it sulfide-rich gasses and what have you.”
Greene has done sonar studies of the Queen Charlotte Fault that have produced images that are surprisingly similar to what Schmidt and her fishing partner saw on their depth sounder. The term “mud volcano” could conjure up thoughts of destruction, but — with a few exceptions — their only similarity to terrestrial volcanoes is their shape.
“If there’s a better term, I’d love to use it,” said Cheryl Cameron, “And right now, I don’t know about one.”
Cameron is a state geologist at the Alaska Volcano Observatory, and another expert Jacyn Schmidt consulted. Cameron is from Sitka and is familiar with the depth sounders people use here while fishing. She hesitates to draw any conclusions from the image Schmidt captured but admits that there are plenty of possibilities.
“A fishfinder is looking for reflections within the water column,” she said. “And so anything that has a density different from that of the rest of the water will cause a reflection. And so that reflector could be indicating a change in temperature or composition, it could be any kind of gas leaking out of the ground that would generate a plume with a different impedance, and thus a reflection. So it could be CO2 (carbon dioxide), it could be methane, it could be fluid with particulates in it — there are a lot of possible causes that are not related to volcanism.”
Nakwasina, where Schmidt was fishing, is not within the Mt. Edgecumbe Volcanic Field — but it’s nearby. Edgecumbe generated headlines last spring when an earthquake swarm signaled that magma was stirring beneath the long-dormant crater. Subsequent radar studies showed that the flanks of the mountain had inflated by several inches over the last couple of years.
Greene says there’s not enough information to rule out that it might be related to what’s happening beneath Mt. Edgecumbe.
“It could very well be associated with that magma that’s moving up into the cone,” said Greene. “It could be that the heat from that magma has started a convection of warm or hot waters that are now venting at that locality.”
Jacyn Schmidt didn’t catch any halibut on the cone, but that unhappy fact hasn’t kept her away. Now, she’s fishing for information.
“Well, we keep going back again,” she said. “My friend, whose boat I was on, has gone back to the same place to check again and again, and it’s still a bump under the water. I still have so many questions, and would like to go back with better instrumentation where you could really see. But I’ll leave that to Gary and to Cheryl to direct.”
Although Schmidt is a scientist by profession, accidentally discovering an underwater mud volcano is a form of citizen science that is very useful to researchers. Cheryl Cameron welcomes any and all observations of geologic phenomena at the Alaska Volcano Observatory. Gary Greene is going a step further and looking for research funding to go down and take a look at the possible mud volcano, or at least take its temperature.
A Sitka woman has died after a boat capsized near Sitka on Sunday morning. Deanna Moore, 51, was a well-known counselor and advocate at Sitkans Against Family Violence and Sitka Counseling.
Two men on board were injured but survived.
Sitka police report that Moore, her husband, 56-year old Jay Stilwell, and 42-year old Roger Hames, Jr. were traveling in Stilwell’s C-Dory just outside of Three Entrance Bay when the boat was pushed into a rock by a wave. A second wave swamped the vessel, and it capsized.
Stilwell and Hames escaped into the water and were picked up by a nearby Good Samaritan vessel, but Moore remained trapped inside the boat. An Air Station Sitka helicopter responding to the scene lowered a rescue swimmer and retrieved Moore from inside the capsized boat.
She was flown to Sitka and was later pronounced dead at Mt. Edgecumbe Medical Center. The two men were transferred to the Sitka Police Department’s emergency response vessel and also taken to Mt. Edgecumbe, where both were treated for injuries.
Moore’s advocacy work brought her to the airwaves many times. Most recently, she shared her perspective on historical trauma in a panel discussion on KCAW’s Talk of Southeast Alaska in October 2020.
U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Lexie Preston, at 17th District headquarters in Juneau, said Monday afternoon that the C-Dory remains semi-submerged in the same vicinity where it capsized. There is no visible fuel spill, and as yet no salvage plan.
The weather Sunday morning in Sitka was clear and cold, with light winds. However there was still a large residual swell from recent gales. The swell, combined with large tides, can generate what one witness at the scene described as “confused seas” in the vicinity of Three Entrance Bay.
