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Juneau’s recycling center is closed again in order to repair damaged critical equipment. 

It could be quite a while before the center opens back up again, according to Denise Koch, the city’s director of Engineering and Public Works.

“Recycling is a really important service, and we recognize that the people of Juneau really value this service,” she said. “What we are doing right now, we hope that we’re talking about a timeframe of weeks.”

The city contracts with Waste Management — the private company that runs the landfill — to operate its recycling program in Lemon Creek. The center has been closed on and off since late December, after Juneau was hit with back-to-back record-breaking snowstorms. That inundated the open-air warehouse with a backlog of materials to process. 

The closures have left many residents and businesses without a place to recycle. That’s a problem, Koch said, because the alternative to holding onto the recyclables is to throw them in the landfill, which is estimated to run out of space in the next decade. She said having the city’s recycling program up and running again is crucial to extending the landfill’s life. 

The closure is due to multiple issues with the recycling baler, Koch says. The baler is the machine that compresses the recyclables into blocks, which are then shipped by barge to recycling facilities in Seattle that repurpose the materials. Koch said it’s the most critical piece of equipment for the center to operate. 

“We’ve identified three different problems with the baler. So we’re trying to solve three problems, and that’s part of why we are working as quickly as we can to try and solve those problems,” she said. “But, it’s challenging to identify a date certain when all three problems will be solved.”

In the meantime, Koch recommends people hold onto their recycling as long as they’re able before they opt to throw it in the garbage. She said the city will provide updates about the status of the center as it becomes available.

After years of delays, the build contract to replace the Alaska Marine Highway System’s ferry Tustumena is out to bid. The state’s project notice calls for the new mainliner ferry to be completed by the beginning of 2029 with an estimated price tag of more than $300 million.

The new ferry will be a more efficient, diesel-electric vessel with capacity for 250 passengers and 58 cars at a time.

“It is really delightful, even just to talk about. You can probably hear the smile on my face,” Louise Stutes said.

State Representative Stutes, a Republican from Kodiak, is a longtime advocate of the Alaska ferry system. Especially the more than 60-year-old Tustumena, which regularly sails from Homer to Kodiak Island communities.

She commended Craig Tornga, the head of the state ferry system, for getting the Tustumena replacement project to this point.

“And there are several shipyards that are interested in it as opposed to the first time it went out where no shipyards were interested,” she said.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy first announced the project in 2021. The initial build contract went out to bid in 2022 – and no bids came in.

“So, they kind of had to reassess it, redesign a few things and we’re good to go,” Stutes said.

Tornga went back to the drawing board on the ferry’s design and overhauled the contract over the last several years. Tornga has previously said that one of the hurdles that delayed the project so long was a requirement that 70% of the money spent on the Tustumena replacement has to go to American companies.

Bidding closes May 28 according to the state’s public notice for the project.

In this newscast:

• Scientists have confirmed that destructive landslides are happening more frequently across Alaska — especially in Southeast — using news articles dating back more than a century. It’s because climate change is making atmospheric rivers more extreme,
• John Bressette is the city’s avalanche advisor, tracking weather and avalanche risk in Juneau’s urban paths. He joined CBJ just before record snowfall — followed by rain and flooding — pushed the city to declare a disaster and issue evacuation advisories downtown. He spoke with KTOO’s Mike Lane about the job,
• Gov. Mike Dunleavy introduced a series of bills on Friday and Monday that he says would stabilize the state’s finances

The state of Alaska’s case against a Haines man charged with animal cruelty is stuck in a holding pattern, seven months after officials first removed dozens of animals from his wildlife facility.

In September, the Office of Special Prosecutions filed three felony and two misdemeanor charges against Chilkat Valley resident Steve Kroschel, the longtime owner of the Kroschel Films Wildlife Center.

After a years-long back and forth over conditions at the center, the office alleged that Kroschel had failed to provide adequate care for his animals, in some cases causing prolonged pain, suffering and death.

The state issued a warrant for Kroschel’s arrest in late December. But there’s a catch — Kroschel says he has been in Russia since last summer, around the time when the state seized his animals. And during a recent phone interview, Kroschel said he’s staying put for now as he works to obtain Russian citizenship.

“I’m not going anywhere now for a year,” he told KHNS.

Kroschel has virtually attended a number of hearings in recent months. But there will be no trial as long as he remains overseas, Juneau Superior Court Judge Amy Mead said during last week’s hearing.

“Obviously, I would not hold a trial,” Mead said. “If you were to enter into an agreement that included a felony conviction, you would need to be here in person because that involves fingerprinting.”

Kroschel said he understood.

The hearing, which focused on how Kroschel’s defense would be handled rather than on the case itself, was scheduled in response to Kroschel’s request that he be allowed to represent himself due to his dissatisfaction with his public defender.

“I know enough about this case, right and wrong, and the protocols to do this on my own. My life is on the line here, my family, everything,” Kroschel said. “I know what I’m doing. I wish to proceed representing myself.”

Mead, the judge, walked Kroschel through the potential risks and warned him that most people who defend themselves are not successful. Then she asked if he still wished to proceed.

Kroschel replied: “Yes, your honor.”

Mead granted the request.

John Bressette is Juneau’s new avalanche advisor, tracking weather and avalanche risk in the capital’s urban paths. He joined the city just before record snowfall, followed by rain and flooding, pushed the community to declare a disaster and issue evacuation advisories downtown.

KTOO’s Mike Lake spoke with Bressette about navigating that moment and what first drew him to avalanche forecasting.

Listen:

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Mike Lane: You’re not new to forecasting avalanches. How did you get your start in this field?

John Bressette: Well, I grew up here in Juneau, and I started going heli-skiing with my friends when I was about 18 years old, and decided I better start learning about avalanches to make sure I knew what I was doing. So I took my first avalanche class here through Bill Glude, who is a longtime avalanche specialist in Juneau and worked on some of this urban stuff a long time ago. Took some classes with him, helped him out with some research projects, and started working for him under Alaska Avalanche Specialists. And in the beginning, he had a contract with AEL&P to do forecasting for them. We also worked out at Kensington Mine and kind of helped develop the program they have going out there now and then I worked for AEL&P directly for a long time under Mike Janes as an avalanche tech assistant forecaster. 

Mike Lane: Where did you work before CBJ?

John Bressette: Well, I was doing backcountry forecasting for the Coastal Alaska Avalanche Center. And still am trying to balance both of those for now. It depends on the time of year; I’m a commercial fisherman in the summer, heli-ski guide in the spring and avalanche forecaster in the winter.

Mike Lane: So this isn’t a full-time position with CBJ. This is more of a seasonal?

John Bressette: Yeah, seasonal for now, and we’ll see how it plays out moving forward.

Mike Lane: Immediately, when you started working at CBJ, you were immediately right in the midst of of a disaster, so what was it like to experience that kind of timing?

John Bressette: Yeah, it was intense right off the get go there. So there wasn’t a whole lot of learning on the job. It was right into it. But I feel like everybody at CBJ was really good to work with, and we kind of seamlessly moved into a pretty good workflow, and were able to kind of make decisions on the fly and keep the public informed of what was going on, and I hope that went well from their perspective.

Mike Lane: What are some misconceptions people have about avalanche danger?

John Bressette: Oh, some of the big myths in the avalanche world are that loud noises can set off an avalanche, which is untrue. I think maybe one of the others is that we can predict how big or how far an avalanche will run. And that’s one of the real tricky points to avalanche forecasting, is not knowing how big or how far an avalanche will run during a given avalanche cycle. So it’s — the science behind it is coming a long ways, but it will always be an unprecise science as far as predicting the size of avalanches.

Mike Lane: Do you have any advice that you could give to those folks who are heading into avalanche terrain in the backcountry?

John Bressette: Yeah, so that’s, I want to make it clear that you know forecasting for the urban danger is much different than forecasting for the backcountry, which I do both. So I’m happy to speak on both, but it’s a completely different thing when you’re talking about people traveling into avalanche terrain, you’re looking more at human-triggered avalanches, whereas in the urban, especially in a place like Behrends, where we can’t do control work, you’re looking at more natural avalanches. So yeah, the advice for people, if they’re heading into avalanche terrain is to take an avalanche class, get some education, find the right mentors and group of people that also practice safe habits and just get yourself educated and find the right people to travel with. 

Mike Lane: And what about equipment? 

John Bressette: Yeah, with equipment. I mean, the bare minimum you want to have is a beacon, probe, shovel, partner — and know how to use those things, too. You know, it doesn’t do you any good if you don’t know how to use the equipment. So getting comfortable with those specific tools are kind of the bare minimum that you need to travel safely in the backcountry.

Mike Lane: Okay. And as far as avalanches go, what do you think we could improve on, CBJ specifically? Are there any lessons to be had that we should know about?

John Bressette: Yeah, I think that having more monitoring tools and using technology that’s come a long way for avalanche and weather monitoring is something we’re pushing really hard to get done. Right now, we’re working with AEL&P and DOT to put together a weather station on Mount Juneau, or, I should say, rebuild. There was one there previously, but we’re kind of revamping it and getting it live again, as well as, thanks to the state and the governor’s office, through this disaster declaration, we were able to buy what’s basically an avalanche radar. So it points at Mount Juneau, and we can now detect when avalanches happen at night or during foul weather. So that’s a really useful tool for us to kind of know when activity starts if we can’t visually see it or hear it. So I think those two things are going to have huge, huge benefits down the road when we enter this kind of avalanche cycle again.

Mike Lane: Are there any hot spots right now that you look at today? You step outside and you look up and you go, Hmm, that’s something we want to keep an eye on, more so than these other areas?

John Bressette: Yeah. I mean, I would say that the Behrends and the White Subdivision pass, the Bartlett pass. Those are our three big ones. Debris came a lot closer to people’s homes and the roads than than we previously thought. So you know, there was debris within 10 feet of a couple homes and on Thane it came down under the power lines and was within 100 feet of Thane road and stuff like that. So, yeah, I would say, when we get a big snow cycle like that, there’s, you know, places that we don’t typically think of the hazard being high that actually came pretty close. So those are the reasons we got people out of their homes. And yeah … I hope that comes through, that people’s safety was of the utmost importance.

Listen to this story:

Landslides have killed at least a dozen people in Southeast in recent years. 

That prompted Aaron Jacobs, a hydrologist at the National Weather Service in Juneau, and his colleague to answer a major question people in the region have been asking: “Are we seeing more landslides across Southeast Alaska?”

A couple of years ago, scientists weren’t sure. Now, Jacobs says the answer is yes.

According to the study, published in the journal Landslides in November, news outlets reported 281 destructive landslides between 1883 and 2025 in Alaska. Jacobs said they decided to use news reports as the data source because if a landslide affected people or infrastructure, it probably made the news.

They found the number of reported landslides started to increase in the 1980s and has skyrocketed in recent decades. 

Fewer than 10 damaging landslides were reported per decade before 1980. From the 1980s to the 2010s, they found a 295% increase in impactful landslides across the state. In the 2010s, 84 damaging landslides were reported. In just the first half of the 2020s, 76 landslides have made the news.

“A big thing that stuck out was the precipitation-driven or triggering events that were increasing within the last 20 years,” Jacobs said. 

The four fatal landslides that hit Southeast in recent years — Sitka in 2015, Haines in 2020, Wrangell in 2023 and Ketchikan in 2024 — were all triggered by heavy rain or rapid snowmelt.

In the paper, the scientists drew a connection between rising average annual air temperatures — between 1.2 and 3.4 degrees Celsius — and a 3% to 27% increase in precipitation across Alaska over the past half-century. 

“It’s all connected,” Jacobs said. 

It’s a result of climate change. As the globe heats up, more intense atmospheric rivers are slamming Southeast because warmer air can hold more moisture. These downpours cause steep slopes to crumble. 

Climate change is also expected to raise the frequency and intensity of storms that dump rain on top of snow. When the rain melts the snow, it rapidly saturates hillsides and can make landslides more likely. Additional research published Wednesday by Jacobs and others found that this phenomenon triggered the 2023 Wrangell landslide.

Earlier this month, Jacobs and his colleagues posted a manuscript of a scientific paper addressing these rain-on-snow events that hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. They used a high-precision weather forecasting model to assess atmospheric rivers in Southeast within the last handful of decades and project how they could change in the near future.

The researchers found that rain-on-snow events coincided with 8% of landslides assessed between 1981 and 2019, including some that were large and widespread. They predict that rain-on-snow events will happen more often and involve an increase in extreme rainfall and snowmelt between 2031 and 2060 as the atmosphere continues to heat up.

How people use the land also plays a role in where landslides occur and how they affect people. On Prince of Wales Island, scientists have mapped nearly 800 landslides. The island is crisscrossed by hundreds of miles of logging roads. 

“The writing is on the mountain,” said Quinn Aboudara, natural resources manager for the Shaan Seet tribal corporation in Craig. 

He said he’s noticed that landslides are more prevalent in logged patches and where roads cut across steep slopes. When he was growing up in Port St. Nicholas Bay, he said landslides weren’t as frequent and more snow fell in the winter. In recent years, it mostly rains. 

“Now we treat the rainy seasons as landslide season,” he said. 

Shaan Seet is piecing together a road and culvert inventory to identify problematic areas. During a deluge, Aboudara said some old culverts meant to funnel water under roads clog or just aren’t big enough to handle the runoff. He said that causes water pressure to build up in the hillside and can lead to landslides. 

“We’re looking to replace those with actual bridge works instead of culverts,” he said. 

At the Sitka Sound Science Center, Luka Silva is working on other measures to reduce risk. He manages the Ḵutí Geohazards Project, which works with Southeast communities to address gaps in landslide science and public safety. 

“Because no one wants to lose their neighbor or their home or their friends or loved ones in a landslide, and we have steps that we can take to make that less of a possibility,” Silva said. 

The center developed an early warning system for Sitka that Silva said other communities are using as a model. Scientists are studying soil thresholds to someday forecast landslides. Many communities are working on or already have landslide hazard maps. 

But some municipalities have struggled to take action. After residents in Juneau pushed back against updated landslide hazard maps, the Juneau Assembly declined to adopt them and rolled back development restrictions in landslide paths. Nearly identical stories played out in Sitka and Haines. It’s because homeowners don’t want to see their property values tank and insurance premiums rise. 

Silva urges people to keep the bigger picture in sight.

“We know what we know about how our landscape is going to change even further, and how our landslides are going to be more and more impactful and frequent,” he said. “What are we going to do about that? And what are we going to do to make people safer?”

This story has been updated with information about an additional study published Wednesday.