KDLG - Dillingham

A Palmer man was sentenced Wednesday to two years in connection with a 2015 drug case.

Police arrested Jorden Bishop, 29, in June 2015 after finding him in possession of 22 grams of heroin at the King Salmon Airport.

In August 2016, Bishop pleaded guilty to fourth-degree misconduct involving a controlled substance in return for the agreed upon sentence.

Bishop has been on electronic monitoring since August 2015, and will likely serve the remainder of his sentence on monitoring rather than behind bars.

A remand hearing to determine that is scheduled for late November.

The incinerator at the Dillingham landfill has been clean-burning trash for a little over a year now.

While it’s doing a good job of cutting down the volume of material that gets buried in limited cell space, it’s not proving as cost efficient to operate as hoped.

The Pennram incinerator needs diesel fuel to operate, mainly to get up to temperature.

Then the burning waste can heat the machine to keep burning more waste, but how well that works depends on what trash is going in.

Public Works Ken Morton director broke down the costs for the city council at a recent workshop.

“So in the first year of operation, the incinerator has consumed about fifty thousand gallons of fuel oil,” Morton said. “(That) works out to about 200 gallons a day, and at the current bid prices, it’s a little over $400 a day to run it, and about $100,000 per year in fuel to operate it.”

That’s way past what the city had hoped it would spend when it started shopping for an incinerator in 2014.

Models that burned that much diesel were deemed to costly to operate.

The Pennram model, however, was supposed to operate on 60 to 70 gallons of diesel per day, and maybe less when the waste stream was high.

A company technician recently audited Dillingham’s unit, and told Morton part of the problem is with Dillingham’s trash.

“In general our waste has a higher moisture level, and has a lower thermal value as well,” Morton said. “He made the comment that our waste stream seems to have a higher percentage of household waste in it than he’s used to seeing, and less commercial waste. And as a result it does not create as much heat when it burns.”

The other problem with the waste stream is Dillingham is not doing a good job of sorting out what’s not supposed to go in.

“There’s glass, there’s aluminum, there’s cans,” he said. “We pull out a surprising number of propane cylinders; they seem designed to jam up the conveyor system.”

The glass melts and can block the burners.

Aluminum melts and can fill the air injection ports.

These problems bring the burning efficiency down, and every time the incinerator has to be turned off, it takes dozens of gallons of diesel to get back up to temperature.

“The lack of sorting of the refuse is a substantial challenge to its operation,” he said.

A lot of the trash that comes in from a local refuse company has not been sorted, and it’s also been compacted, making it more challenging on the staff to sort.

Most other bagged garbage isn’t coming in separated either.

Morton suggested when landfill rates come up for renewal next year, the city consider incentivizing better trash habits.

“If you show up for example with your trash and you do the Boy Scout’s honor that it doesn’t have aluminum cans, doesn’t have glass, it would be beneficial for that to be reflected as a much lower price than if somebody brings in waste that does not have that assurance,” Morton said. “I’d like to encourage to where we’d could get a balance that’ll run through the incinerator better, and that which does not, we’ll run that to the open cell.”

Public Works is still looking at other variable, such as how many hours a day and days a week it should operate outside of the summer peak, when even at 24 hours a day it couldn’t keep up with the incoming trash.

There’s a tough balance between paying staff to keep it running and paying for fuel to restart it after stopping.

Burying trash isn’t cheap either.

Morton estimates it can take about 20 cubic yards of covering material per day, at a cost of roughly $225 per day.

He said the landfill’s active cell should have space through the the winter.

Work on an expansion cell is underway.

Morton said he would keep crunching the numbers and look for more options on how to best burn and or bury the town’s trash.

Dillingham police are asking the public for help in locating Michael Kohler, 28, who is wanted on numerous warrants, mainly for theft and forgery.

Kohler was released from jail to Jake’s Place on Oct. 7 for drug abuse treatment, Dillingham Police Department said.

On Oct. 12, during a field trip to the Alano Club, Kohler walked off and reportedly took the Jake’s Place van keys, facility keys, two ATM cards and a cellphone from residents’ property left in the van.

While he was in jail, police interviewed him about several other cases.

In one case, “a man reported that Kohler stayed at his residence and stole two checks from him,” Police Chief Dan Pasquariello described those in an email. “The checks had been forged and a total of $500 was stolen from the man’s account. Kohler admitted to forging the checks, and then having other persons cash the checks for him, giving him the money.”

He’s facing forgery and theft charges in that case.

Another person reported to police that “Kohler had stolen his ATM card and made numerous withdraws from his bank account, totaling $680.98,” Pasquariello said. “Kohler admitted taking the man’s ATM and making the withdraws.”

A third case involved a forged check as well.

“A man reported that Kohler had asked him to cash a check from the Bristol Bay Heritage Land Trust, but the bank refused to cash the check,” Pasquariello said. “The check had been stolen in the Aleknagik Building burglary on September 30, 2016. Kohler admitted forging and asking the man to cash the check. He stated that he had found the check inside of a Delta Western truck, and denied being involved in the burglary.”

The thievery is tied to drug use, Pasquariello said.

Anyone with information about Michael Kohler’s whereabouts is asked to call Dillingham police at 842-5354.

This summer a cleanup effort in Togiak National Wildlife Refuge removed more than a ton of junk from the area.

Jennifer Johnston was the Student Conservation Association Directorate Fellow this summer, and she helped coordinate the effort.

They focused their efforts on several sites that were full of what she describes as, “the left overs from old hunting camps or equipment that had broken down and was abandoned.”

The sites were full of “snow machines, or generators, things like that, you know, and other equipment — buckets, barrels and fuel containers,” she said. “Just things that served their purpose, and then people left them where when they broke down or people no longer needed them.”

She and the others involved in the project had to do a bit of reconnaissance.

She spoke with refuge personnel and area residents to get a sense of where these sites were located. Then they had to find the sites by plane.

Kara Hilwig is a pilot and biologist at the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge, flew with Johnston to find a number of these sites.

“So when we go and do one of these cleanup efforts usually its a pilot and a biologist or an intern,” Hilwig said, “We go out there, fly over the site, and identify where all of the trash may be.”

But it wasn’t all chit-chat and aerial observation.

The cleanup itself was hard manual labor.

The sites they cleaned this summer were all plane accessible, so they would land, process the debris, and load it up in airplanes.

“With the metal stuff, we actually take electric saws all out there, and cut the lids off of it, and then jump on it,” smash it down as flat as we can get it, you know, so that it’s a consolidated, crushed up bunch of metal.” Hilwig said. Then they “put a nice tarp down in the airplane, so we don’t get dirt and garbage in the airplane, then load it up with all of this crushed debris and take out to the landfill where it belongs instead of out in the wilderness.”

To date, five sites have been cleaned up.

There’s still a lot to do.

More than two dozen sites still need cleaning, and Hilwig continues to spot new sites as she flies in the area.

Some of them will only be accessible by raft.

“I think it’s just going to be an ongoing project. It seems as though every time I go out and fly, I see something else, and something else, and somethinig else,” Hilwig said.

The refuge is looking into grants and debris removal methods that will allow them to continue the cleanup effort in 2017.

One person was injured when a Ford Expedition drove off Aleknagik Lake Road early Sunday morning.

State troopers say the accident happened about 5 a.m. near Silver Salmon Creek. The Expedition rolled over and ended up in the woods by the downhill curve in the road.

Volunteers with Dillingham’s EMS responded.

Of the four passengers, one was hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries.

Kendall Alvarado, 21, of Dillingham was driving. Alcohol and speed were “significant factors” in the crash, Troopers said, but did not specify what if any charges will be filed.

Dillingham Volunteer Fire Department was called to the scene before 8 a.m. Sunday to a fire in the N&N Market.

An automatic sprinkler system apparently kept the early morning fires allegedly set inside the market down, but not out.

“When we made entry, the building was full of smoke, pretty heavy smoke,” Assistant Fire Chief Malcolm Wright said. “There were fires in several different places, and they’d been knocked down by the sprinkler system. The sprinklers did their job, but there was still a lot of smoke, and (we) had to overhaul the materials that had burned.”

Dillingham Police Chief Dan Pasquariello issued a news release, confirming an arson and burglary investigation is underway, though no suspects have been named.

“Investigation revealed that person(s) had broken into the building, stole numerous items from the store, and deliberately set the store on fire,” the release said.

The ATM had been targeted, Pasquariello said, but he did not want to comment on other items stolen.

There appeared to be two spots fires were started in the store, Wright said.

One was back in the clothing section near the footwear, and another was where bulk paper towels are sold on an aisle end cap, next to the produce section and the freezers.

Those were areas firefighters focused on pulling apart materials to stamp out the fire.

Wright, a veteran firefighter, had no doubt the fires had been set intentionally.

“Yeah, there is no way I could waffle on that. But I want to leave it to police to say more when they’re ready,” he said.

As to the extent of the damage, Wright said it was “pretty heavy” inside, but credited the sprinklers with preventing the fire from spreading further.

“There was a bunch of stuff (damaged) on the shelves, some shelving, some lights, but probably much more water damage I would think,” he said. “Took us a while to get the sprinklers turned back off.”

Two Dillingham police officers were inside collecting evidence immediately after the firefighters cleared the building.

Pasquariello could not be reached for comment Sunday morning.

A witness at the scene, who asked not to be named, told police that noises were heard and the power was out at N&N about 3:30 a.m., and not long after a vehicle sped quickly from behind the store and drove down the road before turning its lights on.

Other store employees at the scene said the perpetrator or perpetrators had broken a window in the rear of the building to gain entrance.

No injuries were reported. The N&N Market was closed for business Sunday.

Pasquariello did not say how many people had been involved, or if the Department has suspects in mind.

The chief said the police are in the early stages of their investigation, and has asked anyone with information regarding burglary and arson at N&N early Sunday morning to contact DPD at 842-5354.