KUAC - Fairbanks

Four children are dead in what Alaska State Troopers say was a murder-suicide in Fairbanks.

A trooper dispatch says officers responded to a call about shots being fired late Tuesday afternoon at a home in the Skyridge Drive subdivision. 

The dispatch says troopers found four children dead from gunshot wounds. Three other children were found at the home uninjured.

The parents were not home.

Troopers say their investigation determined that one of the dead children, a 15-year-old boy, shot three siblings and then himself. 

The Office of Children’s Services has been notified and the bodies of the four dead youth are being sent to the State Medical Examiner’s Office.

Troopers say the investigation is ongoing.

Line crews worked through the night after high winds in the Tanana Valley on Monday downed trees and broke power lines, causing several fires and widespread power outages across Fairbanks.

The blackouts affected 30,000 Golden Valley Electric Association customers, including the central emergency communications dispatch for the entire region.  

At one point the Fairbanks Emergency Communications Center sent subscribers an alert saying there was no 911 service for much of the Interior, but the service was restored about 45 minutes later.

Fairbanks Memorial Hospital lost primary power but is supported by three backup generators.

“The main power went off and it triggered the generator power. So they were completely fine. They were up and running, and GVEA had them up and running,” said Nancy Durham, the Fairbanks North Star Borough’s emergency manager.

Several area fire departments responded to fires that started when trees pulled down power lines. Alaska Forestry firefighters responded to a wildfire overnight west of Fairbanks. Fire information officer Sam Harrell says it started by a tree downing a power line in the Standard Creek Road area.

Harrell says there were also fires near Cripple Creek west of Fairbanks.

A fire nearly started at the home of Frank Chythlook when a huge white spruce tree came down right next to his house, taking power lines with it.

“I heard this crack, and it came down on top of a power line. It was kind of like, suspended by this power line, not quite touching the ground. I was glad that it didn’t blow the other way and crush the house,” he said.

Chythlook said a fire crew monitored the situation and kept people from approaching.

“After GVEA was called, they said, ‘hey, try to stay 300 feet away from a downed power line. I took that pretty seriously,” he said.

Renicka Gober was luckier — there were no power lines near the tree in her front yard — but a 40-foot black spruce broke off near its base and wrapped itself over her roof, breaking again at the apex. She was inside with her grandchildren eating dinner when it happened.

“I just heard the crackling of the tree and boom, it just fell over on top of my roof. And, uh, yeah, we were pretty scared. Neighbors came over to kind of check on us, you know, made sure that we were okay, which we were. You know, here I am, trying to figure out the next move on how to get the tree off of my roof,” she said.

This is the second region-wide power outage in the Interior in as many weeks.

A Fairbanks man is recovering from COVID-19 after getting seriously ill during a 12-day wilderness rafting trip on the North Slope.

Seventy-seven-year-old David Hamilton is an experienced backcountry traveler and was part of a group floating the Canning River earlier in July. Hamilton says another member of the party had COVID-19 but didn’t know it until they were out on the remote river.

“He was pretty miserable there for a few days, and we did everything as far as following protocol, masking and distancing and so on,” he said. “But I got COVID out there.”

Hamilton says he’s fully vaccinated and boosted, but he also has asthma, and he quickly became very sick.

“Pretty tired, wiped out, achy, had a bad headache, a really bad cough, couldn’t stop coughing,” he said. “And my blood pressure went off the top too, so I knew as was in — I had to get out of there.”

Hamilton used a satellite phone to call 911 and began communicating with an operator.

“She asked what’s the nearest town, and I said Kaktovik, and she says how do you spell that,” he said. “Then she said is there any roads, or can an ambulance get to you, and I said ‘No, Kaktovik is about 150 miles away and there’s no roads at all out here. I’m in the middle of nowhere Alaska, on the North Slope on a gravel bar on the Canning River.’”

Hamilton says the operator gave him the number for North Slope Borough Search and Rescue, which sent a helicopter out of Utqiaġvik that picked him up and flew him to Deadhorse.

He said that a medevac plane landed about 10 minutes after he got to Deadhorse, and within an hour and a half he was at the hospital in Fairbanks.

“It was just slick,” Hamilton said. “It was just really highly professionally done.”

He emphasized the value of his $125 per year medevac insurance.

“If you ever had to pay for one of those, it would just bankrupt you I’m sure,” he said.

Hamilton says he’s testing negative now and has largely recovered. He says he’s been doing wilderness trips his entire life and plans to continue.

A group of young wood bison are being transported to the Lower Innoko River region in Western Alaska. It’s the latest step in a decades-long effort by state and federal agencies and Alaska Native groups to re-establish the animals in Alaska. 

The 28 yearling wood bison are part of a group form Alberta’s Elk Island National Park that were trucked to Fairbanks in April. Alaska Department of Fish and Game wood bison biologist Tom Seaton says the animals spent the last three months at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Large Animal Research Station.

“When we first got them, they were just kind of bony calves that had just been weaned, and we wanted to get their body condition up. So we got them on some really good hay from Delta Junction and supplementing them with alfalfa pellets to try to improve their protein so they can gain some muscle mass,” he said. “This summer was a great growing summer, and you can really see it in the bison. Some gained as much as 200 pounds since April, and it’s pretty amazing.”

The even mix of female and male wood bison are destined to join a herd seeded by animals transplanted from Canada to the Innoko River region in Western Alaska in 2015. Seaton says the young bison were separated into four groups of seven in preparation for this week’s trip.

“They’ve had some time to develop their social relationships in those groups of 7, which is important because you don’t want certain individuals in a container working out their dominance hierarchy when they’re being transported,” Seaton said.

The bison are traveling in four customized steel shipping containers, which longtime project partner Carlile Transportation trucked from Fairbanks to Nenana Wednesday.

Carlile Transportation senior account executive Eleanor Harrington says the company provides the service for a nominal fee because it supports the wood bison project.

“This is just one of the coolest projects,” she said. “My background is in animals, so I’m personally very invested in this.”

From Nenana, it’s a three-to-four-day barge voyage along the Tanana, Yukon and Innoko Rivers to a pre-staged release site on the Innoko. Seaton says 2 biologists are accompanying the wood bison on the river trip, during which overheating is the biggest concern.

“They take shifts and monitor them 24 hours a day, and there’s air conditioning units on there, and temperature and humidity sensors,” he said.

Seaton says the journey is stressful for the wood bison, which will be released into a large, fenced area to adjust to their new environment. He says the enclosure was constructed by Holy Cross and Shageluk residents at a site along the Innoko River in an area where the existing herd of around 130 animals gathers for the rut this time of year.

“We need to connect them with the wild bison so they can join that social group and learn about where to eat and where to go, and what to do and all that from the wild bison,” he said. “So if we can get the bison settled, and then the wild bison show up, then we’ll turn them out.”

Seaton emphasizes that bison are very good at finding other bison.

“Young bison want to be with adult cows and adult cows want to keep young bison with them, and so even for young bison that they don’t know, there’s an attraction there, a magnetism there that will work in our favor,” he said.

Seaton says a grant from the Bureau of Land Management is covering the $300,000 cost of this latest phase of the reintroduction project.

He says another 11 bison from the same group of yearlings brought from Canada in April are remaining behind in Fairbanks because they are still a little too small to be released into the wild. He says that group will likely join the others along the Innoko River next summer.

The cool, rainy weather that set in last week over much of Alaska has dampened this year’s fire season, which was shaping up to be one of the worst in recorded history. State and federal agencies are sending some crews home, but officials warn that the fires could come roaring back after a day or two of dry, warm weather.

Hot and dry weather earlier this summer created the perfect conditions for the wildfires that have burned nearly 3 million acres in Alaska this year, making it the sixth-worst fire season on record. In response, agencies have mobilized 2,000 firefighters from around the state and Outside. And they were about to raise the state’s fire-preparedness rating to its highest level.

“We’re at four now,” state Forestry Division spokesperson Sam Harrell said. “Five is the top. Last week and the week before, we were planning level five.”

Harrell says all of that changed over the past week or so after thunderstorms that had been spawning dry lightning finally began to produce rain.

“Tomorrow morning, Alaska will be dropping to a preparedness level of three,” he said.

In response to the change in weather, officials reduced the fire danger level in many areas and lifted the statewide emergency burn ban.

Harrell says some of the elite fire incident management teams brought up from the states are preparing to pack up and head home.

“Fire season is picking up in the Lower 48, and there is a demand for resources,” he said. “Once they’re done with their assignment in Alaska, we are demobilizing them back to the Lower 48, or back to Canada, depending on where they’ve come from.”

That’s what happening with the Lime Complex, a series of 18 wildfires that have burned more than 865,000 acres in southwest Alaska. Harrell says forestry officials also hope to soon take over management of the 38,000-acre Minto Lakes Fire, northwest of Fairbanks.

He says management of the 61,000-acre Middle Tanana Complex fires, burning between Salcha and Delta Junction, also is downsizing.

“The fires aren’t growing anymore, and so the management team there has moved to a smaller group, from a type 2 incident management team to a type 3,” Harrell said.

The cool weather has slowed the 72,000 acre Clear Fire that’s burning west of Anderson. And Harrell says fire officials there want to take the opportunity to limit the fire’s growth.

“They’re still dealing with some active portions of line on that fire. And as crews are not needed on some of these other fires, we’re rerouting them to Clear,” he said.

Harrell says fire officials remain cautious because they know it’s possible that hot and dry weather could return. He says that’s happened in past fire seasons that look a lot like this one.

“In our previous large-acreage years, that’s how those summers played-out. We would have our typical lull this time of year, only to have it dry out in August and September,” he said.

Harrell says the fire season is only half over, and the Forestry Division will keep busy suppressing high priority wildfires well into the fall.

The main artery between Fairbanks and Valdez reopened yesterday after a weeklong closure due to flood damage. 

Department of Transportation spokeswoman Danielle Tessen says the worst damage was under a 70-year-old bridge at milepost 233, south of Black Rapids.

“The road actually completely washed out at that bridge, causing this closure to be a little bit longer because we had to rebuild the road to open it up,” she said.

Still, the closure was shorter than many expected given the extent of the damage. Tessen says crews worked day and night work to bring earth and material to the site to rebuild the road.

Pilot cars and flaggers will guide traffic through seven areas where crews are still working, including at Bear Creek.

“We have crews that are gonna be actively working. Some of that work is going to be cleaning out culverts, working in the ditches, but we also have a ton of work still happening at Bear Creek,” Tessen said. “But the good news is you can get through now.”

The flooding also damaged a fiber-optic cable, limiting cellphone and internet service throughout the region.

Th Bear Creek Bridge was on a DOT replacement schedule even before the washout. The project is in the design stage and scheduled to start construction in 2025.