KCAW - Sitka

Sitka’s tap water, locally sourced from Blue Lake, won second place last week at the American Water Works Association taste test competition.

Water One, an independent public water utility that serves Johnson County, Kansas, took first. Water One also won the people’s choice award. Sitka didn’t enter that contest because it would have required shipping more water to Texas.

Sioux Falls, South Dakota, finished third.

Environmental Superintendent Shilo Williams says Sitka was one of 26 finalists from the United States and Canada. To enter, competitors must first win their state or regional contests, and can’t have any drinking water violations on their record from the previous year.

Sitka qualified for the national competition after winning Alaska’s title.

The contest took place at the AWWA national water industry conference in San Antonio, Texas. Williams shipped two one-liter glass bottles of Sitka water to the conference in a cooler, but her hopes were nearly dashed in a shipping disaster.

“While I was there, I received an email from the contest coordinator that said our bottles had come broken,” Williams says. “So we were really bummed out about that. And I thought that was the end of it and that we wouldn’t have a chance.”

But the next day, Williams received word that only one of the bottles had broken, and they were back in the game.

Three judges from the water industry tasted all 26 contestants samples.

“They certainly were taking their time, smelling and tasting the water, and they were marking down their notes,” Williams says.

The judges then narrowed it down to five finalists for a second round of sampling.

Williams says it’s the first time they’ve entered the competition, and she believes it’s the first time an Alaska utility has placed in the event.

“I’m really excited about it. But you know, it really has really nothing to do with me. It’s all about our great source water,” Williams says. “Blue Lake is a pristine water source. So we’re really lucky to have blue lake as our source water. I mean, it’s fantastic water just on its own. We provide very minimal treatment, low chemical addition.”

Williams says she’s thankful for the dedication of city staff that ensure safe water is delivered to Sitkans.

Sitkans who felt the ground shaking on Monday afternoon weren’t imagining it.

The Alaska Earthquake Center reported a magnitude 3.5 earthquake that struck at 12:50 p.m., about 37 miles west of Sitka and 9 miles deep.

Recent seismic activity near Sitka has centered around Mt. Edgecumbe — recently classified as historically active — which experienced a swarm of earthquakes in April.

But Natalia Ruppert, a seismologist with the Alaska Earthquake Center in Fairbanks, says Monday’s quake was not associated with the volcano.

“This earthquake was on the Queen Charlotte Fault — it’s a major strike-slip fault off Southeast Alaska. We record this type of earthquake once in a while,” Ruppert said. “They are not very frequent, but we do record them occasionally.”

Ruppert says the earthquake center received reports of the earthquake being felt in Sitka and as far away as Douglas. She says anyone who felt the rumblings can share their experience with the center here.

Three people were critically injured in a small airplane crash near Yakutat on Tuesday, May 24. A fourth was treated for minor injuries.

At about 3:15 p.m., Coast Guard headquarters in Juneau received an emergency locator transmitter alert as well as a phone call from a good Samaritan reporting that a single engine DeHavilland Otter had crashed.

The plane went down some 30 miles outside Yakutat, in the woods near the Dry Bay airstrip. Photos by the Coast Guard show the Otter’s crumpled fuselage with its wings broken off.

The rescue was a joint effort between Air Station Sitka, Air Station Kodiak and local emergency responders. According to Lieutenant Erik Oredson at Air Station Sitka, it took about an hour and 20 minutes from takeoff for Coast Guard to reach the scene just after 5 p.m.

Oredson said local responders from Yakutat were first to arrive and had already begun administering medical aid.

“There was already another aircraft that had brought emergency medical personnel from Yakutat and had landed at the airstrip,” Oredson said. “Two of the people had already been extracted from the aircraft, and they had them on backboards at the airstrip there. And there was a third person that was still in the plane.”

A fourth person with minor injuries had already been taken to Yakutat by a good Samaritan when the Coast Guard arrived. The three victims with serious injuries were medevaced aboard an Air Station Kodiak C-130 to Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage and transported by EMS to Providence Alaska Medical Center and the Alaska Native Medical Center.

The cause of the crash is under investigation.

A Sitka organization is working with the Alaska Energy Authority to install a mostly federally funded electric vehicle charger in the community. But figuring out where to put it is a complicated problem. An electric vehicle advocate from Juneau recently offered his advice on the question.

In pure numbers, Sitka a national leader for EV ownership. But there isn’t a single public charging station.

“If you were your own state, you would be beating California right now, in terms of EV adoption,” EV advocate Devon Kibby said. “Hardily beating California.”

Kibby is an electrical engineer and the founder of the Alaska Electric Vehicle Association, a nonprofit, all-volunteer advocacy organization for electric cars, trucks and buses. He says that, based on the latest data from the Division of Motor Vehicles, Sitka had 126 electric vehicles — 90% of them Nissan Leafs. That’s 15 for every 1,000 people in Sitka. Elsewhere in the state, that number drops down to around two.

Barb Bingham said the community had unique characteristics that made electric vehicles attractive for many residents — but the absence of public charging stations is a problem for some.

“I think we lead the nation because we’re at 14 miles of highway,” said Bingham. “But I think for commercial businesses with light duty fleets, apartment dwellers, and liveaboards in the harbor that would like to have electric vehicles — and for most of us who trickle charge — it would be nice to be able to do a fast charge once in a while.”

Bingham was one of the co-hosts of a presentation organized by Transition Sitka on May 23 to hear from Kibby about his work advocating for Juneau’s 19 public charging stations. Kibby bought a Leaf in 2014 and said he was okay charging it at home overnight from a regular electrical outlet.

But as Juneau’s population of electric vehicles grew, so did the need for public infrastructure.

“Sometimes my car doesn’t get plugged in at night — I forget,” Kibby said. “And then secondly — and the thing that we’ve been working more on in Juneau lately — is people who don’t have garages. So apartment dwellers, people in the downtown core of Juneau who don’t have off-street parking: How to help them go EV.”

80% of the cost of Sitka’s first-ever public charging station will be covered by the Alaska Energy Authority, which is using funding from the federal infrastructure bill to install public charging stations along every fifty miles of national highway in the state. That qualifies Sitka for exactly one charger — Sitka’s “national highway” runs from the roundabout to the airport.

Now it’s a matter of figuring out where to put it. The site must have access to power. And if it’s on private property, it will require the cooperation of land owners.

What likely won’t be needed is any high-tech networking equipment or credit card readers. Kibby said that the best value has proven to be charging cars for free.

“When people plug into these level 2 chargers for an hour, the cost for the electricity is a couple dollars at most,” he said. “And we found in the beginning that the cost to charge someone a few dollars exceeded the cost of electricity itself.”

Kibby said that Juneau’s first chargers were second-hand and came with ports that may become obsolete when electric vehicles eventually adopt a standard. Sitka’s charger will have four ports and will have to be more advanced by necessity, as electric vehicle battery capacity has grown massively.

Kibby’s 2014 Leaf had a battery capacity of 24 kilowatt hours. A new Chevy Bolt has about two-and-a-half times that. A new Rivian pickup truck comes with a staggering 180 kilowatt battery. A level 2 charger draws about as much power as a clothes dryer but can still take a long time to replenish those huge battery packs.

Kibby said this has forced a change in Juneau’s approach since the first public charging stations were installed in 2017.

“When you used to go and plug your Leaf in for an hour, and you’d recover about 25% of your charge,” Kibby said. “And that seems like a lot. A quarter of your battery was replenished in an hour. But with these newer vehicles that are coming out, we’re starting to think more about how they’re going to need to be plugged in longer but less frequently compared to the Leaf.”

Transition Sitka organizers conducted a brief straw poll among attendees at the presentation about their preferred location for Sitka’s lone, federally funded public charging station. There wasn’t a clear consensus.

Kibby urged Sitkans to consider what they wanted to accomplish with the charging station.

“Is it going to charge personal light-duty vehicles, or allow the electrification of some commercial fleet?” he asked. “What in your mind is the best use, or low-hanging fruit, of the electrification sector that could occur because of this station, considering that you guys already have nation-leading adoption (of EVs) with no public chargers?”

The Alaska Volcano Observatory updated Mt. Edgecumbe’s status on May 9, classifying the volcano as “historically active.” But that doesn’t mean it’s any closer to an eruption.

A lot of people in Sitka have become used to describing Mt. Edgecumbe as “dormant,” but that term really isn’t used by geologists.

“It’s a word that isn’t very well defined in volcanology,” said geologist Cheryl Cameron of the Alaska Volcano Observatory. “It doesn’t have a lot of specific meaning to us. And instead, we tend to talk about volcanoes with how recent or long ago it’s been since they were active, or since they had an eruption.”

Mt. Edgecumbe was formerly known as a “Holocene” volcano because the geologic evidence of its last major eruption dates from the Holocene era, around 12,000 years ago. The AVO now classifies Mt. Edgecumbe as “historically active.”

“For this flavor of active, we don’t require that a volcano has had an eruption,” Cameron said. “So volcanoes can get put into this category through having had a recent eruption, or a suspected recent eruption, or they’ve got a period of deformation or seismic activity or fumarolic activity that we think reflects the accumulation of magma in the crust below the volcano.”

A “recent eruption” usually means within the last 300 years, but the AVO recognizes that Native oral histories indicate an eruption history that goes a few hundred years beyond that.

Being classified as “historically active” doesn’t mean that Mt. Edgecumbe is about to erupt. Rather, the volcano is going to get more attention now from scientists. There are over 50 “historically active” volcanoes in Alaska.

Cameron says a geophysical team was on the ground in Sitka to do a temporary seismic installation on Kruzof Island that includes a global positioning system. The GPS can provide data in real time about any deformation of the crust that might be happening.

Cameron grew up in Sitka. She says the seismic swarm in April that got this ball rolling could have gone unnoticed — but it didn’t.

“My brother sent me the earthquake location, and he said ‘Cheryl, what’s up with this?’ And I said, ‘Well, gosh, let me ask the seismologists,” Cameron said. “So the seismologist said, ‘you know, there’s a swarm.’ And of course, we still needed to do more work and further analysis to determine if the earthquakes were some sort of rather mundane tectonic processes or if they related to the volcano.”

Cameron says the Alaska Volcano Observatory is making plans for a permanent seismic installation on Mt. Edgecumbe and that any volcanic activity would likely come with plenty of advance warning.

“We don’t want people losing sleep over it,” she said.

Although the show Spongebob Squarepants was carefully directed at a cartoon-loving demographic in the late 1990s, parts of the delightfully offbeat production were happy accidents. Like Spongebob’s jazzophile neighbor Squidward and his somewhat random clarinet performances.

The musical genius of Squidward can be traced back to one person who now lives in Sitka and shares his gifts every week on his own radio program.

Brad Carow grew up in Los Angeles — a “valley kid,” born and raised in the San Fernando Valley.

“My father worked in the film industry, he was a sound effects man,” Carow said. “He had a friend who got me a job as the driver for an animation company. And after a month, they liked me and they got me into the editors union, and I was an apprentice sound effects editor.”

He was working on cartoons like Heathcliff. And soon he made the move to Universal Studios, then Warner Brothers.

“It was a magical time being on the lot in the eighties, because the real icons of film were still around,” he said. “And you could see them, you know, meet them.”

He’d see actors like Ernest Borgnine walking around the lot, and Anthony Perkins, who was directing Psycho 3 at the time. One day he helped Jimmy Stewart find his way to Stage 4. And he met a few animation legends in the eighties too, like Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny.

“He was a really, really nice man,” Carow said. “Of course, he was a dirty old man. He had a watch that had a naked lady on it, but he was a cool cat.”

It took about ten years for Carow to go from assistant to associate film editor, then to full fledged film editor.

Eventually he ended up at Nickelodeon Studios. And one day he found himself editing the pilot for a new show about a yellow kitchen sponge that would end up rocking the world of childrens’ television from a pineapple under the sea.

That’s right — Spongebob Squarepants. Carow was asked by the creator, the late Stephen Hillenburg, to write a song for the show that sounded like the theme to the sixties show The Mod Squad. Carow wrote a piece and recorded it in the studio with trombone and trumpet players recording multiple parts, along with bass, piano and drums — he played all five saxophone parts himself.

“Steve came into the studio, he heard it once. He said, ‘That’s the right one.’ Carow said. “And he wanted it to be the main title for the series,” Carow continued. “But Nickelodeon said, ‘No, no, no, we want something that has lyrics and tells the backstory of the characters.’”

“If they had used that music as the main title theme, I wouldn’t have to work for a living, you know? But that’s okay,” Carow said.

Even though they didn’t pick his theme, Carow went on to write songs for the show, including the Jellyfish Jam. He even wrote the music for the F.U.N. song — you know, the one that drove parents up the wall in the early aughts?

But perhaps his biggest contribution to the Spongebob universe is a mediocre jazz performance that has now become iconic.

“Steve remembered that I played clarinet, and he said, ‘You play clarinet, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ Well, he said, ‘You know, we have a character on Spongebob who plays a clarinet. Would you be interested in covering that part? I said, ‘Sure.’ Well, that was about 23 years ago.”

Squidward is a grumpy, jazz loving octopus who lives next door to the child-like Spongebob and his friend Patrick. Squidward laments their interruptions of his clarinet practice.

“All the clarinet I play, I’m improvising, right? So it’s considered an original composition,” Carow said. “So I am the owner of all that crappy clarinet playing that Squidward does.”

Carow spent 30 years in the film industry. But one day he’d had enough. He decided he wanted to switch careers and become a therapist, something he had a little experience with as a taxi driver in LA.

“People would get in my cab and just spill their guts to me and tell me everything about them because they never see me again,” he said. “And that was when I realized that ‘Hey, I’m a pretty good listener.’ So it was going back to that, that really made me feel like ‘Yeah, I think I could do this.’”

Now he’s worked in the mental health field as a therapist for 10 years. He says that while he’s proud of his decades in the film industry, he wouldn’t go back.

He’s still able to have time for his creative pursuits, like music. He still plays Squidward’s clarinet when the Spongebob showrunners need it for an episode. He’s in an-up-and-coming local saxophone quartet.

And he has a show on Raven Radio called Groovin’ Hard with Brad Carow. It’s all about something he shares with his clarinet counterpart, Squidward: his love of jazz.