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The fast ferry Fairweather ended its Sitka sailing today (Wednesday) due to problems with its automated engineering system.

The ship left Juneau for Sitka in the morning, but turned around before entering Sergius Narrows, which can have strong currents. It returned to Juneau for repairs.

The ferry’s engine room is un-staffed, and the equipment is controlled and monitored via computer. Ferry chief Mike Neussl says the problem is with that system, not the engines.

He expects the Fairweather to be ready in time for its Thursday sailing to and from Sitka.

 

At least $10,000 worth of heating oil has been stolen from Juneau homes so far this year. Since January, Juneau police say there’s been nearly twice the number of thefts than were reported for all of 2010.

The latest was for $200 in oil stolen from a tank at the back of a Lemon Creek area home. It’s prompted police to ask Juneau residents for help.

Spokeswoman Cindee Brown-Mills says police have no leads in any of the cases.

“We have in 2011 so far 19 cases and I wonder how many have not been reported or never discovered,” Brown-Mills says. “There’s not anyone area of town that’s been more affected than others so we don’t really have a whole lot to go on. This is really something we need the public’s help on if we’re going to catch people doing it.”

Local fuel-delivery companies say they’ve been getting their fair share of complaints about oil thieves, especially now that prices are more than $4 a gallon. Reliable Fuel says calls come in spurts, and have averaged two a month this year.

The best deterrents? Lock the tank, put it behind an enclosure, or install a video camera. Police say be a nosey neighbor and pay attention to what’s happening in your neighborhood.

Taku Oil’s Tim Hansen says locking caps will help, but a determined thief can still get your oil.

“Those plug-type caps seem to work better. They’ll go inside the hole in the tank there, rather than being up on a spout where someone can tip off the fill spout with a pipe wrench,” Hansen says. “Definitely the more obstacles you can put in people’s way, the less likely people are going to try to get some (oil) from you. Below ground tanks are pretty hard to get to.”

Juneau police say anyone with information on stolen oil should call JPD at 586-0600, or remain anonymous and leave a tip at www.juneaucrimeline.com.

The wreckage of a single-engine plane that crashed July 24th on Douglas Island rests in a Juneau hangar. A National Transportation Safety Board crew is piecing the aircraft together for the investigation into the accident that killed Charles Luck and his wife Liping Tang-Luck.

The NTSB preliminary report indicates the plane crashed very shortly after Luck communicated with the Juneau tower. So soon, says investigator Clint Johnson, that in interviews the air traffic specialist used the term “moments.”

“Mr. Luck called in, indicated that he was about 10 miles to the southeast, landing Juneau, and right after that, we’re not sure exactly how long it was, just moments after that, they received a very faint ELT signal,” Johnson says.

That Emergency Locator Transmitter signal led searchers to an aircraft debris field, at about the 31-hundred foot level of Mount Ben Stewart, near the Eaglecrest Ski Area. The fuselage and bodies were not found until the following day. It was six days before skies cleared enough to recover the bodies.

Johnson has been conducting interviews and expects to review Juneau Air Traffic Control Tower tapes later this week. He’s also awaiting autopsy results.

“What we’re doing is gathering information on the pilot, as far as past history, experience level,” Johnson says. “Obviously there was an autopsy and toxicology screen, which is very, very standard for anybody who’s killed in an airplane accident.”

Charles Luck was a physician assistant at the SEARHC health care clinic in Hoonah. According to Johnson, Luck had not filed a flight plan for his early morning trip to Juneau.

Johnson says the Cessna was being operated on visual flight rules. While weather conditions at the accident site aren’t known, the Juneau airport tower reported marginal conditions that morning.

Johnson says local pilots tell him that when the cloud ceiling is low in Juneau, it’s often even lower over the area where the plane crashed.

Juneau Deputy Mayor Merrill Sanford wants the city to pull its support for the Tongass Futures Roundtable.

Sanford believes the roundtable has changed direction since the assembly passed a resolution backing its work in 2007. Most logging advocates left the group earlier this year, and Sanford says he’s no longer comfortable giving it the city’s blanket support.

“If they wish to come before us and ask for approval on some topic, that’s fine with me. But I can’t sit here as an assembly member any longer and let this move forward in a different direction than what we thought it was going to be,” said Sanford.

The Tongass roundtable is a group of stakeholders that came together five years ago in an attempt to find consensus in the often contentious public policy debates surrounding the nation’s largest national forest. It includes the US Forest Service, conservation groups, and Native organizations, including regional Native Corporation Sealaska. Juneau Mayor Bruce Botelho is the group’s facilitator.

At this week’s assembly meeting Sanford made a motion directing the city attorney to draft a resolution rescinding the assembly’s earlier declaration of support. Botelho recused himself from discussion, because he felt his role as facilitator presented a conflict of interest. Reached by telephone Tuesday while out of town on business, Botelho declined to comment.

Sanford’s motion passed unanimously. But Assembly member Karen Crane expressed concern that the city not ditch its support for the roundtable without a thorough review.

“I don’t know enough about it to say yay or nay at this point,” Crane said.

The assembly’s 2007 resolution supporting the roundtable was approved unanimously, and signed by Sanford, who was deputy mayor at the time. The largely symbolic declaration talks about the effort to create a “steady, reliable, and predictable” timber supply to “support an integrated manufacturing industry.” It also discusses protecting “watersheds with important values” and “maintaining the natural values and ecological integrity of the forest.”

Earlier this year the State of Alaska and timber industry representatives quit the roundtable, citing its inability to increase logging in Southeast Alaska. Representatives of Petersburg, Wrangell, Craig and Coffman Cove also pulled out of the organization. In its place the Parnell administration formed a state Timber Jobs Task Force that includes no representatives from the conservation community.