KUAC - Fairbanks

Now that Congress has OK’d oil and gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain, opponents are preparing for the next phase in their decades-long struggle to protect the environmentally sensitive area.

“This fight is not over. For the Gwich’in, it has just begun, on a whole new level,” Bernadette Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich-in Steering Committee.

She says members of the Fairbanks-based organization are taking a few days off before they resume their efforts to protect the coastal plain and its wildlife from oil-industry development.

“Right now, we just take the time to calm down, because there’s a lot of anger,” she said. “And we can’t act out in anger.”

The Gwich’in consider the lands that would be opened to oil and gas exploration as sacred. They also worry the industrial activity will harm the Porcupine caribou herd and other wildlife that’s essential to indigenous peoples’ subsistence.

“I would just say for every body just to enjoy their loved ones,” Demientieff said. “And in the new year, we will unite, get back on track, and work on ways that we are going to keep them out of the Arctic refuge.”

Local conservation groups also are preparing to launch campaigns to protect the coastal plain, in concert with their national counterparts and indigenous peoples organizations.

“You’ll see Northern Alaska Environmental Center and our partners here in Alaska continue to stand in solidarity with the Gwich’in nation,” Elizabeth Dabney, executive director of the Northern Alaska Environmental Center. “This is a huge blow to their way of life. And a lack of an acknowledgement of the time they spent in Washington, D.C., raising their voices.”

Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition spokeswoman Jessica Girard accuses Alaska’s congressional delegation of favoring industry over Alaskans who oppose opening the coastal plain to oil and gas development.

She said U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski sold out by voting in favor of the federal tax-reform bill that contained provisions to open ANWR, despite another part of the bill that will cripple the Affordable Care Act – which the senator said she opposed earlier this year.

“I think we saw a spike in support for the refuge, specifically here in Alaska, when people began to realize that Murkowski did sell out her health-care vote simply to get her pet project, which is the Arctic refuge,” Girard said.

Murkowski has denied those accusations, saying the bill’s provision to repeal the universal mandate from the health care act, quote, “restores to people the freedom to choose” because it eliminates the requirement that all Americans be covered by health insurance.

Dabney said Murkowski’s role in including ANWR in the final budget bill casts doubt on her explanation.

“It was an underhanded way to get the coastal plain in there. And it was also pretty dangerous and totally disregarded the Gwich’in,” she said.

Neither Dabney nor Girard would offer specifics on the new campaigns they say will be launched in the coming year to halt development of the Arctic Refuge.

Girard says conservation groups intend to take full advantage of the years-long federal process of identifying lands with oil and gas potential and then conducting lease sales, all of which must be done before drilling can begin.

“There’s many hurdles that are in the way of opening the refuge.”

Throughout that time, Girard says opponents will be waging political fights in Congress, filing lawsuits and staging protests here in Alaska and nationwide.

Four Alaska wild fire professionals are working on blazes in southern California.

Alaska Division of Forestry spokesman Tim Mowry said the Alaskans deployed south have special skills.

“One is an emergency firefighter who went down as a near-operations branch director,” Mowry said. “Two of them went down as prevention technicians and one of them went down as a status check-in recorder.”

Mowry said most Alaska wild firefighters take the winter off, and the four in California this month, notified agencies they were available to work.

”Alaska’s not received an order for any crews or modules yet,” Mowry said. “They did express a little bit of interest, and we’re in the process right now of trying to see who’s available and how many people we have that are available that we could send down there if they did put an order in. But so far, it’s been a pretty limited specialty positions that they’ve requested.”

Mowry said it’s the latest that Alaska fire fighters have gone south to work, noting that fire seasons have been extending longer in recent years.

”Like last year’s burst of fires they had in Southeast U.S. where we sent over a hundred people down, but that was mid-November,” Mowry said. “At this time of year in mid-December, it’s very unusual. But, it is a sign that, what we’ve been seeing the last few years, is that things are changing and the fire season’s getting longer in Alaska, but it’s now almost a year-round deal in California.”

The current wildfires in the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara areas, follow even more devastating blazes that killed 42 people and destroyed or damaged 14,000 homes in northern California in October.

One of the Fairbanks Four is suing the city and four Fairbanks police officers over allegations that his civil rights were violated by police during their investigation of a 1997 murder, which led to a trial and conviction of the plaintiff and three other defendants in 1999.

Marvin Roberts claims in a suit filed Thursday in Federal Court in Fairbanks that the four officers falsely accused him and his three co-defendants of the murder of 15-year-old John Hartman.

The suit claims the four officers built their case on phony evidence, and that they and corrupt city officials disregarded evidence that incriminated others and instead pushed for conviction of the four defendants, who came to be known as the Fairbanks Four.

“There’s basic safeguards that the police and others involved in the system,” Michael Kramer, Roberts’s attorney, said. “And some of those are basic investigatory techniques that don’t just focus on a single individual or a single suspect.”

Kramer says the lawsuit also asks the judge to release Roberts from the terms of a agreement the city offered the Fairbanks Four in 2015, after another man confessed to the killing. The city offered to vacate charges against the Four, who by then had spent 18 years behind bars, but in exchange, the four men had to agree to withdraw their claims of prosecutorial misconduct.

The agreement also required them not to sue the state, the city of Fairbanks or any of the officers or others involved in the case.

“It was an inherently coercive agreement that he entered into it, although the city’s going to try and hide behind it,” Kramer said. “We think that the judge will find that he was under extreme duress, that the agreement was coerced and that it just can’t be enforced as a matter of public policy.”

Kramer says if the judge agrees, Roberts will seek damages that will enable him to recover some of the income he was unable to earn while behind bars.

“He lost out on the most productive years of his life,” Kramer said. “And while he can’t get those years back, one thing we can do to this case is make the city accept responsibility and hopefully provide some compensation for him, in the end.”

City officials declined to comment on the case today, claiming they hadn’t had a chance to review the complaint.

The other three defendants are George Frese, Kevin Pease and Eugene Vent. Frese and Pease are Athabascan, and Vent is also Native American. The lawsuit alleges prejudice by investigators and other officials against indigenous people played a role in the conviction.

A hearing on the lawsuit has not yet been scheduled.

Technology that removes fine particulates from wood and coal stove smoke is being readied for testing in North Pole as part of a citizen science project.

Local veterinarian Jeanne Olson and a group of other Citizens For Clean air members installed the electrostatic precipitator device in the woodstove pipe at her clinic last week, and Olson said it’s awaiting final check.

“To make sure it’s centered right and isn’t going to arc. I haven’t lit the fire in my stove to check that, but I’m planning to do that this week,” Olson said. “We’re looking to get some instruments to test the emissions, all different conditions this winter.”

Olson received the $2,000 Swiss-made unit, called an EcoTube, from company representative Nico Lauer.

Lauer travelled to Fairbanks last week to deliver and help install the stack mounted device, which creates a low power electric field inside the stove pipe.

“This electric field basically ionizes the particles that go through it,” Lauer said. “They get charged electrically, and because of the electric charge, it gets attracted to the chimney and deposits there — takes up all of the fine dust out of the smoke.”

Electrostatic precipitator technology has a long history of use in power plants and other industrial applications.

The EcoTube residential-sized unit has been available for six years, but only available in the U.S. since September.

Lauer said only two others have been installed in the U.S., but thousands are in use in several countries, and it should work here too.

”We have no doubts whatsoever that’s going to function right away,” Lauer said. “My recommendation is that you do, probably a season’s worth of testing to get the insurance that this thing operates well.

North Star Borough Air Quality Control commission vice chair Cathy Cahill has a Ph.D. in atmospheric science with three decades experience studying air pollution.

“We don’t have the information necessary to really evaluate its functioning under our conditions,” Cahill said.

Cahill said proving the effectiveness of the Eco Tube will require thorough local testing.

“Yes, they’ve used it other places in the world, but they don’t have a long track record of working with the kinds of fuels we work with,” Cahill said. “I’m definitely interested in seeing how this is actually going to function.”

Cahill applauded the citizen science project that Olson and Citizens for Clean Air have undertaken in North Pole.

She said the borough does not have the capacity to test the Eco-Tube.

“At the moment, having people watch whats happening at Jeanne Olson’s house in terms of how the ESP works,” Cahill said. “It’s going to be a key first step, and then we can try to see if we can apply for grants for pilot projects.”

EcoTube’s Lauer said the company already has gotten the units certified in other countries, and is willing to go through the process to get U.S. approval.

”If there’s issues about certification by the EPA, we’ll be delighted to do it,” Lauer said. “Needless to say, it’s approved around the other countries of the world where people are using it.”

The technology was brought to local attention by borough assembly member Lance Roberts, who’s sponsored an ordinance to allow people who install the devices on their stove pipes to be able to operate them during local burn bans triggered by poor air quality.

The measure, which is pending before the assembly, would also allow qualifying residents to be reimbursed the cost of the device through a borough subsidized program.

The Trump administration announced last week it has asked Congress to appropriate $2.1 billion to expand the missile-defense base on Fort Greely.

The request would include $200 million to pay for construction of a fourth missile-silo field at the base. The remaining amount would be used to buy and emplace 20 interceptor missiles in the new field.

The three existing missile fields at the base on Greely now accommodate 40 of the nation’s 44 ground-based mid-course defense interceptors, a system designed to destroy an incoming enemy missile while it’s still above the atmosphere.

Officials with Boeing Co., the ground-based mid-course defense system’s prime contractor, announced last week that the company and subcontractors had installed the 40th interceptor at the Greely missile-defense base.

That was the last of 14 additional interceptors that the Obama administration had ordered in 2013, after a previous confrontation with North Korea over its development of an offensive ballistic-missile system that the nation’s leadership is building to enable it to deliver nuclear warheads to adversaries.

President Donald Trump said the fourth missile field and its 20 additional interceptors are needed to defend the U.S. from a missile attack by North Korea.

All three members of Alaska’s congressional delegation applauded the proposal and pledged to work for passage of a measure that would amend the Defense Department budget to authorize appropriating money for the missile-base expansion.

The Bureau of Land Management is taking the lead on an environmental review of the state proposed Ambler Road.

The controversial project would punch an industrial access road from the Dalton Highway west to the Ambler Mining district.

The proposed 211-mile road already faces substantial opposition from many area residents.