Interior

Smoke is spreading over a large area of the state, as wildfire activity grows. There were 56 new wildfires Monday statewide, and 238 active, mostly in interior and southwest Alaska.

One of the top priority blazes in the interior is the Rex Complex Fire, burning off the Parks Highway north and south of Anderson. Alaska Interagency Coordination Center public information officer Timothy Evans says the complex consists of two fires: the over 4,000-acre Fish Creek blaze, north of Anderson, and the much larger Kobe Fire to the southwest.

Evans says firefighters focus is on structure protection, adding that some homes have already been lost.

Meanwhile, Evans says two fires north of Fairbanks, off the Elliot Highway prompted evacuations in the Eureka area, while another blaze far to the west, and threatens the Yukon River village of Nulato.

The fire spotted into Nulato yesterday, but Evans says fire fighters were able to save the community.

Numerous other interior blazes continue to crop up daily, primarily due to lightning. Those close to structures are getting responses, while others burning unchecked in remote country send smoke into populated areas. The 13 thousand acre Blair Fire, 40 miles south of Fairbanks is blamed for a dense haze that blankets the city.  With so many wildfires raging, Division of Forestry spokesman Jim Schwarber says the response is getting more complex.

So far this season fewer than 500 wildfires have burned 324,000 acres, an early season total Schwarber describes as relatively modest.

National Weather Service meteorologist Don Aycock says optimal fire weather is forecast to continue this week, and smoke is expected be an issue for several days.

Aycock says some weather anticipated for later in the week could help the situation, and that weather systems could bring rain to the eastern Alaska Range and interior, but its unclear if that will extend west to Fairbanks.

 

One of four Fairbanks men fighting for exoneration from murder convictions was paroled last week. The Alaska Native community gathered in Fairbanks over the weekend to welcome home Marvin Roberts.

Friends and family sang and danced to celebrate the release of Marvin Roberts. Roberts is one of the so-called “Fairbanks Four,” men whose convictions for the 1997 beating death of 15-year-old John Hartman, have long been questioned.

The three others: fellow Alaska Natives George Frese and Eugene Vent, and American Indian Kevin Pease remain jailed.  A request for post conviction relief, currently working its way through court, centers on new information pointing to others being responsible for the Hartman attack. The Interior Native Community has increased support for the Fairbanks Four in recent years, something the 37-year-old Roberts recognized in brief comments at the weekend event.

Roberts has been in a halfway house in Fairbanks since last week, after transitioning from prisons where he spent the last 17-plus years. Speaking at the Saturday event, Tanana Chief’s Conference President Victor Joseph reflected on the bittersweet feeling of many.

Joseph emphasized the importance of the event as a fundraiser for the Alaska Innocence Project, which along with other attorneys is working to exonerate the Fairbanks Four.  Their request for post conviction relief largely hinges on self-incriminating statements by two former Fairbanks men serving time for unrelated killings.

Alleged statements by one of those men about the Hartman murder, remains under seal of attorney client privilege, a situation Innocence Project Director Bill Oberly calls very unique.

Oberly remains optimistic justice will prevail, pointing to Robert’s parole despite maintaining his innocent. Oberly is hoping for a ruling releasing he sealed statement prior to an evidentiary hearing scheduled for October.

 

Kids from several villages and Fairbanks are gathered in the Yukon River community of Tanana last weekend for a basketball camp that seeks to do more than just help young people brush up on their bucket skills.

The training is being conducted by Damen Bell Holter, a young man who grew up in Hydaburg, played basketball in Ketchikan and knows well the struggles some kids in rural Alaska experience. Cynthia Erickson got the event lined up. She lives in the Athabaskan community of Tanana and works with young people struggling with abuse and addiction in their families. She says 40 kids are attending from Manley, Fairbanks, Anvik, Tanana and other communities.

“So it’s just an inspiring opportunity for all these kids and everything they’ve heard about Damen and his camps is just really positive,” Erickson said.

Erickson says she was pleased with the high turn out which is more than the entire student body of the Tanana school. She says Damen heard of the presentation that young people from Tanana made to the AFN convention in Anchorage last year. They spoke out about the pain of dysfunction in their families and communities and he reached out to Erickson, wanting to help.

Holter played for the Celtics and now plays for a team in Turkey. He started sponsoring the camps to help kids know they can aspire to better outcomes for their lives. Erickson says during the weekend they’ll hand out pledge cards that ask kids to honor and protect themselves and others and stand together to stop suicide.

“On the back of it, it has ‘ need help keeping your pledge, contact the care line and then it has the 800 number on it, so we hand that out at all of the things that the kids go to,” Erickson said. “And we tell ’em, put your name on there, take that pledge and if you have trouble there’s a number on there to call.”

Erickson formed a 4H group to start getting kids into positive activities but she said some are dealing with such trauma, cutting themselves or contemplating suicide, that she instead formed a non profit called, My Grandma’s House.

She says the idea that it’s bad luck to talk about suicide is wrong. Erickson says it must be discussed and that won’t promote more self-harm but she prepares the young people she works with for the prospect of future suicides.

“It’s not because we’ve started talking about it. We’re saving…if we lose one, that’s a day we’ll have to deal with but we really are changing the way things have been.”

She says there hasn’t been a suicide in Tanana in five years, but she’s dealt with more than that number in her own life and the Trooper shootings in Tanana last year took a heavy emotional toll on the community. Erickson says she tells the kids, it took decades of dysfunction to get to this point and it will take time to turn it around, but she stresses it’s not difficult to help kids feel better about themselves. It doesn’t take money, it takes time.

“We’ll be picking berries or cutting moose meat or jarring fish, they’re just tickled to do anything and they feel so good, they bring their jam home or we do raffles and they do a little jam basket and they just enjoy the time and the learning and that’s the whole missing link is, the key to this is family and time,” she said.

Erickson says the Damen Bell Holter’s basketball camp will work with elementary kids in the mornings and high school kids in the afternoons through the weekend. In the evenings, a community picnic, swimming, tubing and spaghetti feed are also planned.

 

Several wildfires are burning in the Interior, including a growing blaze east of Delta Junction. Division of Forestry spokesman Tim Mowry says the Healy Lake fire made a major push west toward Delta beginning late Wednesday night and increased in size from 2,000 to up to 6,000 acres.

“It sort of switched directions last night around midnight and it did bump up against the Tanana river and it spotted across the Tanana river,” he said.

Mowry says officials are working today to get a more accurate map of how much the fire has grown. He credits fire fighters with stopping the fire’s advance across the river, toward Delta.

“Forestry personnel and volunteer fire departments, a load of hotshots that were in Delta, they responded. They had a couple bulldozers out there and they were able to get these spot fires that spotted over into a stringer of spruce,” he said.

Mowry says an area of agricultural fields shields Delta from the fire area, but managers want to keep the flames east of the Tanana River.

Firefighters are also working to protect recreational cabins along the lake. The uninhabited village of Healy Lake is on the opposite side of the water from the fires, and is not threatened.

Another lightning caused wildfire well north of Healy Lake is being allowed to burn. Mowry says it a matter of resources and priorities.

“Were going to keep an eye on it but we don’t currently have the resources to address that fire and… there are no structures threatened,” he said.

The Michigan Creek fire is listed as 30 acres.

A lightning start, this time west of Fairbanks was a priority Wednesday night. Mowry says a forestry patrol spied the Standard Valley fire from a nearby hilltop.

“A crew doing a patrol up on Ester Dome, they spotted that fire, and we were able to jump on it really quickly… and that was a really good catch because that fire could have started getting some life.”

The Standard Valley Fire was halted at about 3.5 acres.

Meanwhile, the Tanana Slough Fire near Dot Lake is now 30 percent contained. The fire increased slightly to 718 total acres Wednesday but remains on an island in the Tanana River.

 

Lightning ignited two new wildfires east of Delta Junction Tuesday night.

Fairbanks-Delta area state fire management officer Ed Sanford says the blazes near the small community of Healy Lake resulted from numerous lightning strikes that hit a swath of Alaska. He says air tankers were deployed on the fires, but they were growing too aggressively to knock down.

“We could not catch it, so we went into what we call point protection, so we have 16 smoke jumpers out there with some boats, setting up sprinkler systems and protecting the cabins out there,” Sanford said.

Sanford says there are about 50 structures, including many recreational cabins, in the fire area. He says an incident management is taking over the fires, which have burned together and are estimated at about 900 acres.

The Alaska wildfire situation is expected to remain extreme. National Weather Service meteorologist Melissa Kreller says hot dry conditions are forecast to continue through the weekend.

”Certainly we’ll be in the 80s across Fairbanks and much of the area, down to the southeast as you’re getting into more Delta Junction and stuff, you might see some isolated thunderstorms,” Kreller said.

Kreller says that mean lighting that could start new fires, adding that minimal moisture is associated with the storms, and certainly no wetting rains.

A wildfire caused by lightning in the interior is burning near the Village of Dot Lake. The Tanana Slough Fire has burned about 500 acres on an island in the Tanana River. The island is about three miles north of the small Native community off the Alaska Highway near Tok. Area state forester Jeff Hermans says suppression efforts are aimed at keeping the fire on the island.

“Not let it escape out of the slough where theres lots of fuels in front of it in either direction. And so far we’ve been successful in that, it’s tried spotting out a couple of times and we’re able to keep the fire in check.”

Hermans says firefighters hope to conduct a burn out operation to consume fuels on the island when winds are favorable.
Meanwhile, another wildfire is burning in the Yukon Flats, near Ft. Yukon.

The Back Yukon Slough blaze had burned about 40 acres as of Monday night. The human caused fire was about 20 miles northwest of the village. The Alaska Interagency Coordination Center reports that 14 smoke jumpers are working the blaze.