Interior

Alaska State Troopers and Fairbanks Police exchanged fire with two men following a vehicle chase on the city’s south side this Wednesday morning. A driver was killed and a passenger injured.

Alaska State Trooper spokeswoman Megan Peters says the incident started at about 9 a.m. with the attempted pullover of a vehicle for a basic traffic violation at the intersection of South Cushman Street, the Mitchell Expressway and the Richardson Highway.

“The stop was for failure to use a turn signal,” Peters said. “The vehicle immediately began eluding troopers. And a few minutes into the pursuit, shots were fired towards troopers from the vehicle from both the driver and the single passenger. More troopers and Fairbanks PD were advised of the situation and attempts to stop the vehicle using tire deflation devices failed. The vehicle finally came to a stop at Dennis Road and Bradway Road. Shots were exchanged between law enforcement and the suspect. The active situation was over at 9:38.”

Peters says no law enforcement officers were injured in the incident, but would not provide any additional information. The situation prompted the Fairbanks school district to initiate a lockdown, but the situation was resolved before it was implemented at all sites. The shooting follows a similar incident in south Fairbanks yesterday, in which an armed man in a vehicle was shot by Alaska State Troopers. Only cursory information is available in that case as well.

Flint Hills continues to push for a less stringent standard for removal of a spilled chemical from groundwater at the company’s shuttered North Pole refinery. Removal of the industrial solvent sulfolane is costing the refinery a lot of money, and opinions differ on how clean groundwater should be.

Historic sulfone spills at the refinery spread to groundwater, and Flint Hills is trying to purge the chemical from the water according to a state clean up plan. The state set the clean up standard of 15 parts per billion while it awaits results of two-year federal study on health effects of drinking low concentrations of the chemical.

Flint Hills has asked the Commissioner of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation to consider upping the standard to 362 parts per billion, a level Flint Hills spokesman Jeff Cook says is backed by a state sanctioned review.

“They went ahead and convened a panel of experts last fall at the University of Alaska. And they determined — with the consideration of being safe, and putting in some parameters to take care of uncertainties — that Flint Hills was on the right track.”

Flint Hills has filed a request seeking an adjudicatory hearing on the clean up standard. Cook says it costs Flint Hills significantly more money to meet the more stringent standard, but stresses that the company continues to adhere to it.

The body of research on sulfolane is small relative to what’s known about effects other industrial contaminants and DEC Spill Prevention and Response Director Kristin Ryan points to that uncertainty in erring on the cautious side until the study, using testing on animals is complete.

Ryan stresses that the cleanup standard Flint Hills is contesting is for groundwater cleanup on refinery property.

The on site contamination is the source of pollution that’s spread to wells on hundreds of surrounding properties in North Pole, where about 1,500 people live. Flint Hills has been providing effected residents with drinking water alternatives, including bulk water deliveries and installation of well water filtration systems, since the contamination was first discovered off site in 2009.

 

In an August 3rd letter to Hilcorp affiliate Harvest Pipeline Company, Richards formally turned down a sale agreement under which the Fairbanks Natural Gas-owned Titan LNG facility at Point McKenzie would be sold to Harvest.

Richards takes issue with agreement provisions, including one that calls for the sale of LNG from the plant at a fixed price he says could result in Fairbanks consumers paying too much if market gas prices tank.

The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority is moving ahead with purchase of Fairbanks Natural Gas as part of the Interior Energy Project. Richards asked that the state corporation be able to buy LNG transportation infrastructure proposed to go to Harvest with the LNG plant. The state also wanted a commitment from Harvest that it would expand the Point McKenzie plant to meet Fairbanks demand.

In written response to the state’s requested changes, Harvest President Sean Kolassa refuses to adjust the sale agreement, saying meeting the state’s demands would create additional risk in a deal he describes as providing a very small estimated profit margin.

 

The Federal Bureau of Investigation in Alaska held a press conference Monday to discuss a child abduction case in North Pole. The rare move by the Bureau is an attempt to calm the public, and recruit them to help.

In a second-floor conference room at the FBI’s Anchorage headquarters, Assistant Special Agent David Condo recapped the criminal complaint filed in the case of an alleged. Condo says that 40-year-old Michael D. Bowen Jr. of Wasilla stopped two sisters aged 9 and 7 on the afternoon of Saturday, August 1st.

“Two-and-a-half hours after the girls had left home they returned, telling their parents they had been grabbed off their bikes by a man in a truck in front of the North Pole Middle School,” Condo read from a prepared statement ahead of questions.

Agents say there is no evidence of abuse during the time Bowen allegedly kept the girls locked in the truck. According to the criminal complaint filed by the FBI, Bowen first denied being in the area where the abduction took place, though later admitted he’d taken the girls, thrown a cell phone out of the truck to prevent tracking, and told the girls “there would be no turning back.”

“When asked why,” Condo told reporters, “he said he thought the girls were too young to be out on their own, and he wanted to teach the girls’ parents a lesson, and he said that he would do it again.”

Law enforcement located Bowen based on extremely specific information the two children gave to officers, all the way down to the brand of sneakers their abductor wore, a ring on his finger, and a flag decorating the rear-view mirror of his Dodge pickup truck. Agents say the information was essential for coordinating with police in North Pole and other agencies trying to locate a suspect in the week after the girls were taken.

Bowen faces two federal counts of kidnapping. The FBI only gets involved in abduction cases when local law enforcement requests their help. The last time that happened in Alaska was the investigation into a family of four–including two children–that went missing from Kenai in 2014. But Bureau agents want local partners to reach out more. According to Kurt Ormberg, supervisory agent for the Violent Crimes Squad, every year the FBI handles 100 to 150 “prototypical child abductions.”

“Just under 50 percent end in a child’s death,” Ormberg said. “That’s why we take this as seriously as we do. We know that monsters do exist. They don’t have horns, they don’t have fangs, they look just like us–but they do exist. And telling our children that, I think, empowers them.”

The FBI in Alaska rarely holds press conferences or comments on open investigations. But officials say that in this case they’re hoping to assure concerned North Pole residents the threat from this particular abduction is over. And that putting out details from the case may lead to more information coming from the public about Bowen.

A request left with the U.S. Attorney’s Office about whether or not Bowen has legal representation was not immediately returned on Monday.

Slow fall chum runs have kept subsistence fisherman from being too active on the Yukon River this past week, but as Chinook continue crossing the border, officials say their numbers are well above escapement goals.

“As far as I know, everybody’s smokehouse is empty, waiting for fall chum,” said Fred Huntington in Galena.

It was a sentiment echoed by many calling into the weekly teleconference for fishermen and managers along the Yukon last week. That wait has been going on for two weeks now—ever since fall chum officially started running around July 18, creating a midseason lull for many fishermen between summer and fall chum runs. Bonnie Borba, the fall chum research biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, said the first pulse of fall chum would be making its way upriver by the end of July and into the first week of August.

In all, the fall chum run on the Yukon is expected at between 700,000 to 800,000 fish. It’s a moderately-sized run that Fish and Game’s Jeff Estensen said may be slow, but they are on their way.

“[Fall chum] certainly will be getting there,” he told callers. “They’re making their way up. I did get a chance to talk to a fisherman in Holy Cross a couple of days ago; he mentioned there are definitely signs … so by all accounts it seems like we have a pulse of fish going upriver.”

The fall chum run should be enough for escapement, subsistence and commercial needs, Estensen said; already, commercial harvesters in the lower river have caught nearly 27,000 fall chum.

But Huntington pressed managers to loosen gear restrictions for mid and upper-river fisherman who are still trying to meet their subsistence needs. Right now, he said, he has to travel downriver to Koyukuk to catch the fish he needs.

“It would be helpful to us, because (of the) price of fuel here, and the lack of fish in our smokehouses, it would help quite a bit if we were able to just go out here with our 5 gallons of gas that we could possibly have [Districts] 4B and C open for drifting,” he asked. “Get our 10 fish or whatever we want to get, rather than going to Koyukuk and trying to get a hundred.”

While fall chum slowly move upriver, the Chinook continue moving into spawning grounds in Canada. As of last week, nearly 65,000 kings have now crossed the border. Stephanie Schmidt, the summer season manager for Fish and Game who oversaw the king salmon run, said beating the upper-limit escapement goal of 55,000 fish is a victory for everyone involved.

“This run is still well below average, well below what we used to see a couple of decades ago,” she began. “However, thanks to the tremendous conservation efforts on behalf of fishermen up and down the river, we’ve been able to achieve escapement goals on all of our Alaska drainage projects so far. And we’ve now achieved the upper end of the escapement at the border. And thanks for working to make sure these fish get on the spawning grounds so we can try and rebuild this run for the future.”

Wolf hunting season is scheduled to open next month in and around Denali National Park, despite record low wolf numbers. This spring, Park biologists counted fewer than 50 Denali wolves, heightening a long-running battle over the popularly viewed animals.

Spotting a wild wolf in Denali National Park is a coveted sight many visitors haven’t enjoyed in recent years as the park’s wolf population has dwindled. Some of that’s attributed to hunting and trapping take just outside the park’s northeast boundary where the animals commonly range. Anchorage biologist Rick Steiner and other conservationists contend harvest restrictions are the only tool wildlife managers have to boost Park wolf numbers.

Steiner and others have asked the Park Service and the state to cancel wolf hunting seasons set to begin August 10th. Steiner says seven or fewer Denali wolves are taken annually, mostly outside the park.

State Fish and Game Commissioner Sam Cotton issued an emergency closure of spring wolf hunting in May on state lands northeast of the park. Division of Wildlife Conservation Director Bruce Dale says ties that specifically to overlapping hunting seasons.

Dale says there was concern about bear hunters also taking wolves, upping the normally low Denali area harvest. Dale attributes the Denali wolf decline primarily to natural causes.

The Board of Game has turned down repeated emergency petitions requesting re-instatement of a wolf protection zone along the Park’s northeastern edge, maintaining there’s no biological emergency. Meanwhile, Steiner and other conservationists also continue to eye a more permanent solution.

Steiner says Denali wolf advocates met with Governor Bill Walker last month, and the solution seemed to resonate, adding that the Park Service is also on board.