KFSK - Petersburg

Nine-hundred thousand chum salmon – that was the catch by the purse seine fleet at Crawfish Inlet south of Sitka on Thursday. It looks to be a new record chum catch for a one-day opening in Southeast Alaska.

Crawfish Inlet is a new remote release site for the Northern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association, or NSRAA. It’s about 40 miles south of Sitka.

This is the second year of fish returning to that location.

NSRAA general manager Steve Reifenstuhl said Thursday’s catch is bigger than any one-day catch on record for the private non-profit’s hatchery at Hidden Falls on the opposite side of Baranof Island.

“At Hidden Falls, and that’s what it’s been compared to prior to the opening, seiners and pilots were both telling me they’d never seen anything like this since Hidden Falls,” Reifenstuhl said. “Their observation was this is better, this looks better. More fish than even Hidden Falls did in its biggest year.”

Huge chum runs at Hidden Falls Hatchery in 1996 and 2000 produced some multi-day openings with catches topping a million fish, but no single-day openings with that large of a catch.

That facility had a record return in 1996 of over four million chum. Crawfish Inlet this year looks like it will top two million, more than three times the forecast of 680,000 fish.

“Right now we’re more than double that, we’re at 1.8 million and we’re expecting it to go to 2.1 to 2.3 at this point,” Reifenstuhl said. “So it’s kind of a phenomenon. We are looking at six to seven percent marine survival. We don’t have all the data in yet but it’s definitely a phenomenon.”

Hatcheries aim to have all of a year’s returning fish caught. Some are used to create the next generation. Others are sold to fund the hatchery’s operations, or what’s known as cost recovery fishing.

If there are enough left over, fishing is opened to different gear groups in what’s called a common property fishery. The board of the private non-profit hatchery association voted to have Crawfish Inlet as a priority area for the troll fleet this year and next.

Reifenstuhl said there was no intention to have a seine opening there, let alone two.

“It was all going to be troll fishery, which has been very successful too and then the rest taken for cost recovery,” he said. “But there were so many fish, Silver Bay (Seafoods) who has the contract for the cost recovery decided they were willing to put in a common property fishery and yesterday was the second one and it broke records for Southeast is my understanding.”

That decision by Silver Bay allowed competitors like Icicle and Trident to share in the bumper crop at Crawfish Inlet. Ninety seine boats were fishing last Thursday, making the average catch 10,000 chum per boat.

It’s an economic boost for both the boats that were fishing and the companies processing the fish in a season without a lot of good news. Reifenstuhl said the value of that one day’s catch was over $6 million to the fishing boats and $13 million for the first wholesale.

No other seine openings are expected there this year.

A nonprofit bought Kake’s fish hatchery last year and plans to have salmon in the building this fall.

The new program will supply chum and king salmon to two different areas near the small town of 600 people as well as a few jobs.

Steven Demmert and his older brother, Victor, were tossing hooks in front of about a dozen dog salmon swimming around Gunnuk Creek in Kake.

They were almost on the doorstep of the fish hatchery, a cluster of red buildings which Steven Demmert said used to make for easy fishing.

“We used to get lots and lots just in one little area,” Demmert said. “And now it’s completely different. I didn’t like the change.”

More changes are coming.

Kake Non-Profit Fisheries Corporation closed down the hatchery in 2014 owing more than $20 million in debt, and the facility sat empty until a non-profit, Northern Southeast Regional Aquaculture Association, bought it last year.

Mike Pountney lives in Sitka, who is maintenance manager for nonprofit,  along with two local employees and a construction crew from Sitka has done a lot of work on this place.

“When we purchased the hatchery, it was in pretty poor shape,” Pountney said. “It had been foreclosed on. They had boarded up the windows. The water lines were not drained properly.”

They replaced water lines, cleared out mold and debris, and replumbed and rewired the entire building.

The electrical room had a bathtub ring from when the building flooded.

“It came from a pipeline underground, and would fill the raceways, flood the raceways, and then because we’re in a low point it would flow into this room,” he said. “We’re also going to replace this door with a water-tight door.”

The hatchery started as a school project, but eventually provided several full-time and seasonal jobs in the community.

Keeping it running has lots of challenges. The creek was a big one.

Association General Manager Steve Riefenstuhl said the creek often gets too cold in the winter, too warm in the summer, and flows too low to support fish year round.

When it rains a lot, and the creek is full.

“Gunnuk Creek is a prime example of a stream with high organic loads so any time you have high flows, you get all these organics that foul up your system,” Riefenstuhl said.

Pountney said having a lot of leaves, pine needles, tannins from the muskeg in the water is not good for salmon.

He said the raceways had been packed with mud.

“We’re going to convert this first raceway into a settling tank,” he said. “When the freshwater comes in from the creek it actually has time to settle.”

He said that will take care of the heavy solids.

Next, a filter will separate fine material and a machine to remove excess carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Then another filter that will flow into a tank.

“It’s going to be an insulated tank,” Pountney said, “That tank is going to be used to change the temperature of the water. We’re either going to heat the water or chill the water so we can make it right for the fish.”

NSRAA’s system will depend partly on Hidden Falls, one of the non-profit’s other hatcheries, so Gunnuk Creek won’t have to support the entire fish population year-round.

Pountney’s goal is to be ready for fish by October 15th.

This year is a trial year, and an assistant manager will oversee a small batch of fry.

Eventually there will also be a handful of seasonal jobs taking eggs, incubating them, and feeding fish.

The plan is to work up to 60 million chum eggs in a couple of years.

Riefenstuhl said NSRAA will also introduce king salmon raised at Hidden Falls into pens at the mouth of Gunnuk Creek.

“They return to their first saltwater experience,” Riefenstuhl said. “They will be imprinted to that saltwater, and when they return as adults they’ll come right back to Gunnuk Creek and the local community will be able to harvest those right out of Gunnuk Creek or in saltwater, whichever they choose.”

The program also will support commercial fishing.

The nonprofit will release chums and, for the next few years, king salmon at a spot near Kake called Southeast Cove.

This year, just two local boats were fishing Southeast Cove with recovery contracts to help NSRAA pay its costs.

Riefenstuhl said that may change soon.

“I think that Southeast Cove will be opened up as a common property fishery for trollers and seiners, and we’ll get our cost recovery at other locations,” he said.

Some people in Kake are more or less indifferent about the hatchery, or at least about the prospect of fishing from it. They say the fish is mushy and it doesn’t taste as good as fish reared without humans’ help.

But the Demmert brothers are looking forward to it.

Back outside the hatchery, Victor Demmert caught a female dog salmon. He plans to take the eggs and freeze them for winter.

Wildfires burning near the Stikine River in British Columbia now are partially contained.

The Alkali Lake fire was discovered Aug. 1 and is estimated to have burned an estimated 96,000 acres.

The fire is now 11 percent contained, according to the British Columbia Wildfire Service.

Firefighting crews are working to minimize further impact to two small communities on the river where some buildings have burned:  Glenora and Telegraph Creek, which is is about 160 miles from Wrangell, Alaska.

“We’re seeing increased inactive edges of the fire and it’s a very slow moving ground fire for the most part but when winds pick up we see increased fire activity,” said Torbjorn Rive, a fire information officer at a firefighting camp in Dease Lake.

It’s an improved status for the blaze that was started by lightning and was burning out of control earlier this month.

The regional government declared a state of emergency early this month and an evacuation order was issued for the area.

Residents in the two communities left for nearby towns.

An incident command crew from Australia has been leading the effort to battle the blaze. Rive said firefighters from across Canada and some from Mexico are working day-and-night.

“We’ve got a total of 170 people here,” Rive said. “We’ve got a night shift going and they’re working on and in support of protecting structures and critical assets. We focus on lives and we focus on critical infrastructure and saving as many homes and other values as much as possible. We’ve got I think 19 pieces of heavy equipment, working on fire guards and that includes four water tenders and we got nine helicopters up here, doing things like bucketing and a little bit of foaming operations.”

Electrical power has been restored to Telegraph Creek.

Traffic has been slowed on the main highway through the area, Highway 37, because of heavy smoke.

The roadway to Telegraph, Highway 51, is open only to fire-fighting crews and critical staff.

Many other blazes are burning throughout the province. The British Columbia government declared a state of emergency Aug. 14 with more than 500 active fires.

Some parts of the forests in Southeast Alaska are a little off color.

Hemlock trees are turning yellow and brown from a sawfly outbreak. But scientists say there’s not much to worry about.

The U.S. Forest Service started getting a lot of calls this month about yellowish trees on hillsides in Southeast Alaska. The color is from dying hemlock leaves, which were damaged by an insect. So, they got their experts to look into it.

Elizabeth Graham is an entomologist who works with the Forest Service in Juneau in a division called Forest Health Protection.

She’s really into bugs.

“This year has just been extraordinary to see the amount of activity,” Graham said. “They are just so cool; the things that insects can do.”

The sawfly’s larvae — which look like tiny green caterpillars — are feasting on hemlock leaves as part of their short life cycle.

They gorge on leaves just before creating their cocoons.

As they eat, the leaves turn yellow and fall off.

“When they’re feeding in this great abundance like this, it’s almost like you’re standing in the woods and it can sound like it’s raining,” Graham said. “But it’s not actually raining. Larvae are feeding and going to the bathroom.”

The feeding frenzy damages the trees but it doesn’t kill them.

The sawflies only eat old needles leaving new growth alone.

Graham and other scientists have flown aerial surveys and taken samples on several islands — Mitkof, Kupreanof, Prince of Wales and Admiralty.

They did see a sawfly infestation. But they’re not that concerned.

The main reason is sawflies are native to the region. They’re part of the normal ecosystem, which means other species keep the sawfly populations in check.

One is fungi, which infect the larvae but this summer’s hot, dry weather hasn’t been a good year for them so sawflies have flourished.

Another natural sawfly control comes later in the cycle and that’s the parasitoid wasps.

“Which are really, really cool. They actually lay their eggs inside these pupal cases and so the parasitoid wasp is feeding on the pupae inside the case and then they will eventually burst out of the case, sort of like an alien,” Graham said, laughing.

Graham hopes some of those alien wasps will emerge from the sawfly cocoons soon.

She’s collected several of the cases to take back to her lab to observe.

Another insect can pair up with the sawfly to cause problems: the western black-headed budworm, which eats the trees’ new growth.

An outbreak at the same time as the sawfly can actually kill the trees. But scientists haven’t seen that this year.

It would take a few years in a row of the sawfly’s population to go unchecked for there to be a cause for concern. And the bugs do play an important role in the forest.

“Birds eat them, rodents, small mammals, it’s an abundant food source,” Graham said. “It’s not something we would want to eradicate.”

This fall, the sawfly pupae will emerge from their brown cases as tiny wasps, but not the kind that sting.

They’ll mate up, then lay eggs, which overwinter and hatch in the springtime.

Graham and her colleagues will continue to monitor them.

Two large fires near the small community of Telegraph Creek on the Stikine River in British Columbia have joined into one and are burning out of control.

Telegraph Creek is 160 miles up the Stikine River from the Southeast Alaska town of Wrangell.

Telegraph Creek was evacuated Sunday and residents were sent to Dease Lake, Iskut and Terrace.

The fires started by lightning were first discovered Aug. 1.

“The fire is still growing and it is still considered out of control,” Jody Lucius, fire information officer with the British Columbia Wildfire Service, said Thursday. “Crews are working to improve the containment on that fire if at all possible but it is continuing to show aggressive fire behavior and with winds in the area is still growing and challenging those suppression efforts.”

A cold front was expected to pass through so crews are preparing for a change in the weather.

At least 27 buildings have burned or been damaged by the wildfires.

No injuries or deaths have been reported.

Power was out in Telegraph Creek but crews are working to restore electricity.

Lucius said the Wildfire Service is bringing in more firefighters from outside the province.

“That fire is definitely a priority for the B.C. Wildfire Service at this time and those numbers will likely continue to increase,” she said. “We do have 133 personnel along with 18 pieces of heavy equipment and 11 helicopters on the fire today and additional resources are en route.”

The focus for firefighters is to protect other buildings and culturally significant sites in Telegraph Creek.

The regional government for the area declared a state of emergency Aug. 4.

Telegraph Creek is on the traditional territory of the Tahltan First Nation.

About 300 people fled to nearby communities, Tahltan Central Government president Chad Norman Day said in a press release Monday. They were praying not to have to evacuate Dease Lake and Iskut as well but were preparing for that possibility.

Eric Yancey of the charter jetboat company Breakaway Adventures in Wrangell made the trip Tuesday to Telegraph Creek on the Stikine River.

“Actually (the) old town of Telegraph seemed to be pretty fine,” Yancy said. “There was a lot of smoldering brush around it and some evidence of where they had dumped some fire retardant on the bank and whatnot but the old town itself seemed to be in pretty good shape.”

The old town has some historic gold rush era buildings.

Most of the residents live in the new town and Yancy thought that was where the buildings had burned.

He did see some burnt log buildings belonging to Wrangell residents downstream from Telegraph and another that had been spared by the fire.

A former Petersburg borough employee Wednesday changed his plea in the van wreck that killed two people and injured a third on July 4th, 2016.

Chris Allen, 25, and the state came to a sentencing agreement that will mean the dismissal of other charges and he will avoid trial, which was scheduled to happen this summer.

Allen pleaded guilty to a charge of manslaughter. Charges of murder and assault were dismissed. Sentencing is scheduled for December.

Allen was driving a borough van that went off the road and flipped over just south of downtown that morning.

Allen and the three other borough employees were helping to set up for a running race for the borough’s Independence Day celebration.

The crash killed Molly Parks, 18, and Marie Giesbrecht, 19, the daughter of the borough manager.

The state charged Allen with second-degree murder, alleging he ignored doctors’ orders not to drive after a documented history of seizures.

Allen appeared from a Fairbanks courtroom by teleconference before superior court Judge Trevor Stephens in Petersburg.

Stephens asked Allen about his understanding of the sentencing agreement and the rights he was giving up with the guilty plea.

Allen made no statement other than to answer yes to the judge’s questions and enter the guilty plea.

The judge has final say on the length of the jail sentence and also will have to decide on length or conditions of probation.

Attorneys for the two sides will be arguing those conditions over the next three months.

Friends and family of both the victims and the defendant attended the hearing in the Petersburg courtroom.

Some are expected to make a statement during sentencing scheduled at 9 a.m. Dec. 10 at the Petersburg courthouse.

Allen was returned custody and will await that sentencing in jail.

Allen, the Petersburg borough and the state also face a civil suit from the family of Molly Parks.