I bring voices to my stories that have been historically underserved and underrepresented in news. I look at stories through a solutions-focused lens with a goal to benefit the community of Juneau and the state of Alaska.
In this newscast:
Snowplows in Juneau have had a busy year and struggled to keep up with clearing roads and sidewalks with limited resources.
After snow dumped in Juneau, it rained for days and covered many sidewalks with ice. It’s making it harder for Juneau residents who experience mobility issues to get around.
Patrick Kearney lives in the Flats neighborhood in downtown Juneau, and he walks or takes the bus to get around.
Kearney is disabled and has mobility issues because of arthritis. He doesn’t use a wheelchair or walker but still has a hard time getting around. He gets services from Southeast Alaska Independent Living, or SAIL, which is an organization that helps seniors and people with disabilities live with as much independence as they want.
This is important to Kearney. He likes to get around by himself whenever possible.
“I’m trying to be self-dependent, independent as I can,” Kearney said. “I don’t want to become totally dependent on somebody from an agency to take care of me right now.”
But lately, it’s been a challenge. He can walk through light snow but sometimes there is no sidewalk to walk on. Or if there is a sidewalk, it might be covered in ice.
“The snowplow guys come in through with their big snowplow trucks. They just clean the street off, but they pile it right up in on the sidewalk and bury cars and bus shelters and how does that help me? So the streets are clean. So I’ll walk in the street, okay. And walk against traffic,” Kearney said.
Keeping sidewalks clear is part of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which means it’s federal law. But implementing it is tricky, in part because no one organization is responsible for clearing sidewalks.
The state’s Department of Transportation and Public Facilities plows Juneau’s highways, out the road and some other high-traffic roads. The City and Borough of Juneau plows mostly neighborhoods. Whoever is responsible for the road is also responsible for plowing the sidewalks.
Businesses and property owners are responsible for clearing snow from sidewalks in front of their property. Capital Transit, a city department, is responsible for keeping bus stops clear.
“We work hard to keep those bus stops clear. It’s not always clear to, you know, the sidewalk to get to the bus,” said Katie Koester, Engineering and Public Works director for the city.
Last year, the city got new equipment to clear bus stops. But if there’s no space to put the snow nearby, it gets piled on the side of the road or sidewalk nearby until the snow can be hauled away.
Koester suggested that people who struggle with mobility use Capital Access if they are eligible for it. It’s a program that provides transportation for people with a disability who can’t make it to a bus stop. She also suggested that people walking around wear ice cleats.
Koester said plowing the roads is a priority so emergency vehicles can get around. The city doesn’t currently have a budget to plow and remove snow at the same time. So to clear the roads, the snow is sometimes piled onto the sidewalks, or onto people’s driveways.
Koester said the goal is to transition to snow removal after clearing the roads in 48 hours. During the winter storms in early January, it wasn’t always possible.
“My plea to the public is to have patience as we work to clear the streets,” Koester said. “And then my gratitude is for the work that homeowners have done keeping their storm drains clear, their fire hydrants clear, you know, shoveling the snow onto their yard from their berms.”
The berms at the end of driveways are a byproduct of clearing the streets that homeowners are responsible for clearing. Those snow berms frustrated enough homeowners in the Mendenhall Valley that one even started an online petition to stop the city from blocking private driveways. So far nearly 440 people have signed it.
This has been a struggle for the McCabe family for years. Joe and Ildiko McCabe have a daughter, Kyra Nylen, who uses a wheelchair, so they need their driveway to be wheelchair-accessible.
“Our handicapped daughter needs 24/7 care,” Joe McCabe said. “So we have health care providers for 12 hours a day and they have to get in and out of the driveway as well as Kyra has to get in and out of the driveway.”
Joe McCabe shovels the driveway for Nylen, but often has to do it multiple times because plows create berms in front of the driveway while plowing through the neighborhood. The school bus comes to pick up Nylen up at the end of the driveway.
“If there’s a berm right there, they cannot lower the ramp as well,” her mother Ildiko McCabe said. “And last year, the school bus driver actually said that even what we shoveled it, it wasn’t good enough. Like they need completely no snow, everything is gone for them to safely transfer the student.”
So in order for Nylen to ride the bus, someone has to stay home and shovel the berm first thing in the morning and then again before the bus comes back to bring her home.
Ildiko McCabe said she has tried all sorts of avenues to fix the problem. Most people tell her to hire a plow truck driver, but she said she has yet to find one who will hang out and wait to clear a berm in front of her driveway.
She called the city’s public works department and Assembly members asking for advice on what she could do. She also asked if the end of her driveway could be designated a handicap zone — which she was told was not possible.
She appreciates the work the city plows are doing and sees that the plows are understaffed and working overtime.
“But appreciating something and admitting that there’s still a problem that has no solution is, it should exist together,” Ildiko McCabe said.
After 10 years of struggling with this issue, Ildiko McCabe doesn’t know how else she can make it easier. She wishes there was some sort of process to indicate to the city that they need to have their driveway handicap-accessible.
In this newscast:
Riverbend Elementary School is closed through Wednesday because of extensive flooding in the building.
Juneau School District Superintendent Bridget Weiss said a pipe near an exterior wall of the building burst this weekend. By the time Monday came around, there was a lot of water in the school.
“I’d say probably two-thirds of the school was impacted with water. So, pretty significant,” Weiss said.
Weiss said the water has been vacuumed up, and now it’s a matter of waiting for the waterlogged floors to dry out. She said it’s too early to tell how extensive the damage is.
The school district will reevaluate the damage on Wednesday and decide then if the school can open. If the school can’t open up because of the damage, Weiss said the district will come up with a backup plan. She said she isn’t sure what that plan will look like yet.
All district schools are closed Monday and Tuesday because of weather conditions. Aside from Riverbend Elementary, they should reopen on Wednesday.
Juneau residents who are running out of heating oil are experiencing delays in refilling their tanks. Meanwhile temperatures are in the single digits, and with wind chill, some nights it’s dipping below zero.
Fuel companies say the delay has a lot to do with the weather.
Over the last few weeks the community has seen significant snow, which gave way to strong winds and dangerously cold temperatures.
Ryhan Nydam lives in Lemon Creek. She relies on oil heat but recently ran out of fuel.
“I woke up the next morning and my house was 40 degrees,” she said
When she starts to get low on fuel, she usually calls Petro Marine Services to get a refill. But when she ran out, she says she was told the company is scheduled a month out for customers who aren’t on automatic refill. And she isn’t.
“I couldn’t afford to pay that much upfront every time that they stopped by, so doing it just on your own time you can kind of budget yourself a little better,” she said.
So Nydam went to Ike’s Fuel company. The company is about a week out for new customers currently, but Nydam figured it was better than waiting a month. She says she signed up to be a new customer and tried to get put on automatic refill, but the company told her there’s a 200 gallon minimum. Her tank isn’t that big.
A callout on social media eventually helped her get some fuel. Someone knew a guy who works at Delta Western. She says the Delta Western employee gave her his personal number, and he was able to get her fuel later that day.
By the time Delta Western got to her house, she says there was ice around the pipes that get the fuel to the house.
“We had to pump the heater going to get it going a couple times,” she said. “I had to get back to work, so then my dad stayed behind and he sat there and pumped it for like an extra hour.”
Nydam says it was stressful trying to find somebody who could get her fuel when she was in an emergency situation.
Russell Cooper with Petro Marine Services says that the company will bring fuel to customers to hold them over until they can refill the tank, and that the wait time for customers not on automatic refill was 3-5 days — not a month.
Cooper says that weather is creating a lot of challenges for the company’s fuel truck drivers to get to some locations. Especially locations that haven’t been plowed.
“And it’s just, you can’t get to them,” he said. “It’s just dangerous. You don’t want to take a fuel truck up these roads.”
Cooper says COVID-19 is also impacting the company. A few months ago he had four employees out at once.
“It’s just a perfect storm of the weather and COVID,” he said.
Cooper doesn’t see the weather conditions easing up anytime soon, either.
“The way it’s looking. I mean, we’re in January already. And February is usually a cold month in Juneau,” he said.
Phil Isaak is the manager at Ike’s Fuel, and he’s been in the fuel business for 37 years. He describes similar difficulties getting to people’s houses, especially out the road.
And he says icy roads are a challenge for the fuel trucks because the chains only work on snow.
“You know, we chain up our trucks, but you just make ice skates out of them,” he said.
Then once the truck gets to a location, sometimes the oil tank is completely covered with snow and can’t be found. Or there are large icicles over the tank. So it’s taking longer for the fuel companies to refill the tanks.
And that means fewer deliveries can be made each day.
“You know the guy that normally gets out 25 deliveries might only get out 12 or 14 because of the conditions,” he said.
And the backlog piles up. On Monday Isaak got 63 calls to Ike’s Fuel, and right now it’s about a week long wait for new customers trying to get fuel.
Isaak says he and the other companies in town are stressed out about the situation right now, especially with more snow forecasted for this weekend.
“When I saw the end of the week forecast was 39 You know, I was on my knees thanking God and then someone said ‘Oh, but it’s gonna snow first.’ And then I was like, ‘Oh man, I don’t know what we’re gonna do.’ But the lead driver over here, Dave, my right hand man, he says ‘We can just do what we can do,’” Isaak said.
Isaak says some things that can help speed up fuel deliveries are plowing and sanding driveways, clearing a path to the tank, clearing snow or ice above the tank and loosening the fill pipe with a pipe wrench.
High winds brought down trees in Juneau’s Thane community, causing an overnight power outage.
High avalanche danger prevented Alaska Electric Light & Power from going to the site of the outage right after it happened Sunday evening around 10 p.m.
There did end up being an avalanche later that night, and two vehicles were caught in the debris. Vice president of AEL&P Debbie Driscoll said that no one was injured and that the vehicles were safely abandoned.
This morning the state’s Department of Transportation cleared a path through the debris.
“Our crew was ready, and as soon as DOT had cleared a path for our crew, our crew safely made it through and came upon the site,” Driscoll said.
Most of Thane got power back around 11 a.m., but there is another outage at the end of Thane Road that the AEL&P crew is working on.
Driscoll said that updates for outages are posted on the utility’s social media and its website.
“The reason why we emphasize that is if we’ve already reported the outage, it’s helpful folks don’t inundate the after hours outage number just because it has a capacity,” Driscoll said. “And so if folks are calling because they have outage information, we want to make sure that they can actually get through.”
