KFSK - Petersburg

Southeast Alaska has suffered from a drought and warmer-than-normal temperatures for about two years now. The month of July broke more records in the region.

Temperatures for most of Southeast were above normal for July.

Sitka’s July was the warmest on record averaging 3.5 degrees above normal. Yakutat also broke their hottest July on record, at 5.5 degrees above normal.

Juneau nearly broke its record: It was 3.8 degrees above normal, making it the second warmest July.

“The rest of the panhandle was generally above normal as well,” said Brian Bezenek, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Juneau. “We’re looking at from a couple of degrees to as much as five degrees.”

For many places around the region the low temperatures for the month were the highest on record. In other words, it didn’t get as cold at night as usual. That was the case for Petersburg, where the average low was a warm 57 degrees.

“So while your daytime highs may not have been that extreme your overnight lows were much warmer than expected,” Bezenek said.

For Petersburg, the average high temperature was 64 degrees. Overall, July was the 11th warmest on record for Petersburg.

As for rain, the whole region was below normal in July. Petersburg got 2.8 inches of rain, which is about half of what is normal.

“Everybody got between about 45% and 80% of the precipitation that was expected so the entire Southeast did not get enough precip really to reach the normal amount,” Bezenek said.

So that means that the Southeast drought continues. Actually, the drought status has increased for the northern panhandle to the level of “moderate drought” and parts of southern Southeast remain in “extreme drought”.

Overall, Bezenek says all of Southeast is short on water.

“The thing to remember with droughts here is, you know, it’s going to take several seasons — and I mean wet seasons — to recover from this,” he said. “Just having one or two good heavy rainfalls is really not going to alleviate the drought.”

Unfortunately, the forecast doesn’t look to be solving the problem any time soon. The National Weather Service predicts temperatures to be above normal and precipitation below normal to normal for the next three months.

“And that’s looking like it might be the trend for the rest of the year,” Bezenek said.

The long-term effects of the drought are not known. Currently, some fishermen worry that the lack of water won’t be good for salmon reaching their spawning grounds.

The ferry union strike might be over, but some Petersburg ferry workers are still concerned about the state cuts to the Alaska Marine Highway System and other services.

Outside a local cafe in Petersburg, Jack Slaght talks with customers about signing a petition to recall Gov. Mike Dunleavy.

“Good morning, would you like to sign this petition to recall the governor?” he asked a woman heading into the building.

Slaght isn’t one of Petersburg’s more politically active figures. He doesn’t usually go to political meetings or protests. He’s a ferry worker — the chief engineer for the state ferry Malaspina. He says that speaking out could cost him his job.

“There could be ramifications,” Slaght said. “There could be retaliation, I understand that my job could be in jeopardy.”

But he says he can’t stay quiet. He’s concerned about many areas cut in the state budget, including the ferry service. Slaght wasn’t part of the striking union, but says his concerns go way deeper than those negotiations.

“The strike is minuscule compared to what is at stake for the whole state in general,” he said.

The Alaska Marine Highway System has released a schedule for the winter with severe cutbacks to ferry services to some communities.

Slaght worries that the gaps in service could lead to what are called “cold unmanned layups,” where vessels are left alone for months. He says that would be devastating to the condition of the fleet.

“Given their age — 55 years old for the oldest ones — if there’s no one on board taking care of them, the damage will be tremendous,” Slaght said.

Another Petersburg ferry worker, Jay Beasley, is part of the union that was on strike. He’s been a steward for the ferry service for six years. He spent over a week striking in Ketchikan at the ferry terminal. Reached by phone, he said the strike that went on day-and-night was worth it.

“Long days, you know, just long days on the picket line trying to drum up support for us,” Beasley said.

Beasley says the governor and many legislators outside of the Southeast region don’t realize how important the ferry system is to residents. He doesn’t think the current winter ferry schedule will get the communities the service they need, nor will it get stewards like himself enough work. It’s tough for him to think about the other workers because they’re such a tight-knit group.

“You’re on this boat for at least one whole week, and you get to know them really well,” Beasley said.

Beasley says the budget cuts will affect his family. His wife is a dispatcher at the police station. He says if he can’t get enough work on a ferry this winter he’ll try to get another job, but he’ll probably end up on unemployment.

“After Oct. 1 in Petersburg, there aren’t a lot of jobs out there,” Beasley said.

He says the state budget cuts — not only to the ferry system — are shortsighted.

“I just think it’s really sad that in this day and age that we can’t find a solution to these problems, other than just take gigantic cuts from the budget,” Beasley said.

Back at the cafe, Slaght would agree. It’s more than just the ferry service at stake.

“I have a little granddaughter who’s the apple of my eye; she’s not quite two. If these draconian measures go unchecked, my little granddaughter will not have a chance to have a good education in this state. So that puts me on the war path. This is not acceptable,” he said.

There are efforts going on throughout the state to recall Dunleavy. It will take over 28,000 signatures to start a recall petition and, later in the process, a public vote.

Tensions escalated Friday, July 26, in a labor dispute that has over 400 workers striking and has shut down the Alaska Marine Highway System since Wednesday.

The state sent a letter to the more than 400 striking workers represented by the Inlandboatmen’s Union of the Pacific warning employees that the state would not be paying health insurance premiums or unemployment compensation if the strike lasts past Aug. 1.

“We want these people to be back to work and we do not want them to lose their health insurance and we don’t want our coastal communities affected anymore,” Department of Administration commissioner Kelly Tshibaka said on a call to reporters. “This is supposed to be one of the record breaking tourist seasons of the year. We’ve got people stranded in places where they don’t know how they’re going to get back home. We have goods and commerce that are being disrupted and affected in tremendous and harmful ways.”

Tshibaka, who signed the letter, urged the union to return to talks through a federal mediator.

Department of Transportation commissioner John MacKinnon said eight of the system’s ships that were in service this week have been tied up at the docks. As of Friday morning there were still 225 passengers and 94 vehicles stranded in ports that were not their final destinations. Those are travelers who are still looking for other alternatives to ferry travel.

“You know this is a peak travel time. There are only so many seats available on airplanes and as you’re probably aware there are a lot of extra flights just to accommodate the summer traffic. And there’s only so much space on these barges heading south,” MacKinnon said.

As of Friday the state was cancelling reservations through July 30. That means cancellations so far for over 3,000 travelers and over 750 vehicles. The refunded fares from those cancellations is almost $1.2 million.

Robb Arnold is on the negotiating team for the employees and said the main goal is a fair three-year contract for the ferry workers.

“Everything else is just a distraction from what the simple fact is: We want to go to work,” he said. “We have crews waiting in parking lots ready to go back on the ship but we need a contract to be able to do that and we haven’t had one. And that’s what the frustration is. And all these delay tactics and name calling and escalations of hostilities is not helping this process.”

Arnold said a meeting with the state and federal mediator is planned in Juneau for Saturday, July 27.

Other transportation providers are making accommodations for some of the displaced traffic. Alaska Airlines spokesman Tim Thompson said one flight was diverted this week to pick up campers at a Bible camp in Juneau and fly them to Wrangell.

“We haven’t had any other calls for diversion but those 46 kids we were able to get them out of Juneau down to Wrangell and the flight was able to continue on,” he said.

The airline also is offering a special fare that waives an advanced purchase requirement for walk up passengers in Southeast Alaska and Kodiak through Aug. 4.

The Inter-Island Ferry Authority (IFA), an independent ferry company, received a request from leaders in Metlakatla Friday to provide service to Ketchikan during the strike. Management is scheduled to meet Saturday on that request. The IFA provides service between Ketchikan and Prince of Wales Island and had not planned on adding any additional sailings because of the strike.

Petersburg’s police chief says the community will no longer have round-the-clock police coverage starting in late August or early September. That’s in response to the Petersburg Borough Assembly’s decision last week not to fill a vacant sergeant’s job.

Petersburg Police Chief James Kerr penned a letter to the Borough Assembly Monday saying the 24/7 coverage will be ending. It means there will be times when non-priority calls to the department won’t have an immediate response by a police officer.

And it’s a decision, Kerr writes, that haunts the entire Petersburg Police Department.

“This is the thing that haunts me the most, is the idea, I mean, we have to implement less than 24/7 coverage,” Kerr said in an interview this week. “I’ve always been in places where you call for an officer, you have them right then and there.”

The department is budgeted for nine officers, counting the vacant sergeant’s job and a drug officer that is grant-funded and can’t be used for patrols. The Borough Assembly last week voted against filling the sergeant’s job over concerns with state funding cuts. The job was advertised in October of last year, but then the borough froze that hire while the Assembly looked at eliminating funding for that position.

In the meantime, officers have been working 12-hour shifts, with one officer on duty at all times.

“Then when they go home, sometimes they get called back because one of the other officers needs help or something like that, and so they actually are working more than 12 hours a day,” Kerr said. “And it’s just long hours and the constant calling back to work. It’s burning people out,” Kerr said.

For obvious reasons, Kerr isn’t willing to talk about what hours of the day or week won’t have an officer on duty. He doesn’t want to give someone breaking the law an idea of the best times for that. However, a dispatcher will be on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But a call or complaint may see a delayed response. In an emergency, an officer will be called.

“You might get one, you might get three,” he explained. “It’s just depending upon the situation how many we need to call out during that time. So officers will be working their normal hours. And then we’re also going to be paying them standby time. And so, we’ve got that extra added cost to the borough. And then every time they get called out, it’s two hours of double time. So if the call takes 30 minutes, they still have two hours at double time. And then they go home. If they get called out again an hour later, there’s two more hours of double time.

“So it’s going to cost some serious money. But with the staffing levels we currently have, we can’t support the 24/7 coverage,” Kerr said.

Kerr said other small Alaska towns like Haines and Cordova don’t have round-the-clock coverage, but officials in those towns have told Petersburg officials it won’t be a money-saving measure because of the standby pay and overtime.

Petersburg Medical Center CEO Phil Hofstetter urged the Assembly to keep 24/7 coverage this year during budget discussions. In a January letter, Hofstetter wrote that the medical center has seen violent patients in the emergency room, requiring nursing staff to call for immediate police help.

“If we don’t have 24/7 coverage with law enforcement, my concern is the risk to staff, particularly after hours,” Hofstetter said. “We don’t have a security force, so we do rely on law enforcement to assist us in difficult situations.”

The police chief said the new coverage schedule will be based on what are typically the busiest times, and he’s open to input on that. The change will allow the current force to switch to a different schedule for its officers, likely 10-hour shifts instead of 12.

Volunteers in Petersburg and several other Southeast Alaska communities are taking a tally of the region’s bat population for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The agency launched the project in 2014 and has been racing against the clock to get accurate data before a deadly bat disease reaches Alaska.

These surveys begin precisely 45 minutes past sunset — which, in late June in Southeast, means the route starts at around 10:30 p.m. Sunny Rice, a marine advisory agent with the Alaska Sea Grant, starts by heading out on Mitkof Highway.

The beginning of the route takes Rice down dirt logging roads for more than an hour. She has a magnetic cylindrical recording device attached to the roof of her car, with a wire running into a handheld GPS tracker. The survey relies on the recorder to take an acoustic snapshot of the bats, which use high-frequency sound to navigate and hunt for prey. Fish and Game then compiles all the snapshots to get a bigger picture of the region’s bat population.

Rice sets off down the logging road, winding through National Forest land in the middle section of Mitkof Island, hoping to hear some bats.

Tory Rhoads, the Fish and Game biologist overseeing the survey, said the main objective right now is to find the caves where the bats roost for the winter. That’s partly to better monitor for white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that affects roosting bats.

“And since we only know of 10 bat overwintering roosts in the whole state, it’s really hard for us to monitor for white-nose syndrome,” Rhoads said. “Which is why one of the key things we’re focusing on is locating more of these areas.”

White-nose syndrome has decimated bat populations across the country. So far, the disease has not reached Alaska — but it is creeping westward, and several cases have turned up in Washington state in recent years.

Rhoads said the driving surveys will hopefully act as an early warning system if white-nose syndrome does arrive here.

“And if we were to see sharp declines in the number of calls conducted on surveys during times of the year we would expect a lot of activity, that would be kind of a red flag for us and something we would investigate further,” she said.

Fish and Game’s monitoring project has been going on since 2014, and it’s currently active in seven Southeast communities. In Petersburg, all you need to do to sign up is stop by the library to fill out some paperwork and pick up a box of audio recording equipment.

Chris Weiss works at the Petersburg Public Library and is the local coordinator for the project. She said this year they’ve had less participation than they’ve had in the past.

“Part of the problem is that a lot of people who’ve done it in the past are just not in town, either any longer or this year,” Weiss said. “They just have not been in town during the times that we’ve needed them.”

Out on the logging roads, Rice and wasn’t hearing any bats. She did, however, count about a dozen porcupines. Then, finally, an unmistakable burst of echolocation clicks came through the speaker — slowed down and rendered audible to the human ear by the recording equipment. Soon the calls were coming in left and right.

In the end, Rice thinks she heard more than 30 bats. As the project continues, Rhoads said the next step is getting a general sense of where the bats overwinter. At that point, she said they hope to bring in scent-tracking dog teams to zero-in on the exact location of the roosting spots.

For most pet owners, visits to the vet are nothing special — maybe even something they take for granted. But what if you don’t have access to medical care for your pet?

This is a real problem for many people in Southeast Alaska’s remote communities. A problem Dr. Ken Hill has been trying to address for years at the Waterways Veterinary Clinic.

Hill keeps his 50-foot aluminum trawler, the Hallie, in Petersburg’s South Harbor. The Hallie stands out among all the seine boats — she’s obviously not set up for fishing. That’s because about 17 years ago, Hill turned the Hallie into a floating veterinary clinic.

Before settling in Petersburg, Hill worked as a bush veterinarian, serving remote towns in the Kuskokwim Delta and the Aleutian Islands, among other places. He has also worked on government wildlife research projects involving sea otters, wolves and moose. No stranger to the ocean, he earned his sea legs as a fisherman working the Bristol Bay salmon run.

Basically, if anyone was cut out to run a maritime animal clinic servicing remote Alaska communities, it’s Dr. Hill. He says the boat clinic model is well suited to Southeast.

“Well it’s just the practical matter, ’cause there’s enough medium-sized communities that don’t have veterinarians down here,” Hill said. “And it’s a very large, interesting place to run a boat.”

The Hallie is a decent sized boat, but most of that is living space and bunkrooms for the Hill and his crew, Laura Wong-Rose of Petersburg and Linda Buehler, a 3rd year veterinary student at Texas A&M. The actual clinic is in the aft part of the boat, and it’s remarkably small, especially with the operating table folded down .

“We’ve had a Great Dane on there before, and the front paws were at the bulkhead and the back feet were coming through the door, you know you had to open the door in order to get him in there,” Hill said.

Despite the size restrictions, the operating room supports a wide range of procedures, from dental work to fixing broken bones — even some kinds of surgery. One of Waterways’ clients is Katie Rooks, who lives outside of Klawock, on the eastern side of Prince of Wales Island. Rooks owns a cat named Cora. She says there is intermittent vet service down the road in Craig, but that usually her only option is to get herself and the cat to Ketchikan.

“We either have to jump on a ferry, me and the cat, you know in a kennel and in a vehicle,” Rooks said. “So you know a round-trip ferry costs in the $120 range, plus probably in all likelihood a night in Ketchikan depending on when the vet can fit me in. Or I have to get on an airplane.”

Rooks has made the trip to Ketchikan before, but it’s expensive and means taking time off from work. For a lot of people, that’s not always feasible.

“So they have to put everything down, you know set everything in their life aside, take off of work, and get on a plane or a ferry depending on how critical their pet is,” Rooks said.

Dr. Hill can’t be everywhere at once, but he can be reached by phone from just about anywhere. In addition to the floating clinic, he offers remote consultations year-round.

Between the regular caseload at the onshore clinic and the frequent phone consultations, it’s been a bit of a challenge finding time to prepare the Hallie for another summer on the water. But the Waterways crew is almost ready for another few weeks of motoring around Southeast, tending to the medical needs of cats, dogs, parrots and even the occasional hedgehog.