Southcentral

This was a terrible year for growing pumpkins. But the acknowledged master of Alaska pumpkin-growing proved, once again, that he’s a giant in his field.

Dale Marshall of Anchorage, holder of the state record for giant pumpkins, rolled up at the Alaska State Fair pumpkin weigh-in with two colossal gourds on a flatbed.

At the loading zone of the crops and livestock barn, fair officials and volunteers went ga-ga.

“Here comes Dale!” someone shouted.

Mardy Robb, who has grown some giant vegetables herself, broke off mid-sentence when she saw what Marshall had.

“I’m sorry, but that’s AMAZING,” she said.

Tension mounted as the pumpkins were gently transferred by forklift.

As it turns out, the tines on the forklift were too short and the pumpkin listed on its platform. A gasp emerged from the witnesses. Everyone knew that damage would be catastrophic. Any pumpkin with a crack or hole would be disqualified.

Marshall kept his cool and improvised a solution, using lumber.

Last year, his record-breaking pumpkin weighed 2,147 pounds. He said he knew neither of his 2023 contenders would equal that.

“Uh, no,” he said. “No. Seventeen to nineteen (hundred pounds) I’m hoping. Right in there.”

The scale showed one of Marshall’s pumpkins was in that range: 1,875 pounds. It would be relegated to mere “exhibition” status, because the other, the one that would represent Marshall’s backyard gourd-growing operation for 2023, was even heavier.

“2,023.5 pounds,” the emcee announced over the loudspeaker.

The crowd went wild. Marshall, who’d been subdued all afternoon, raised both arms in victory.

The silver-medal contestant, Keith Malone, grew a 600-pounder. It was a personal best, but Malone says second place is as good as it gets for him.

“I trust Dale to be here with a big one every year,” Malone said.

Marshall said after the fair, his winning pumpkin will be back in his yard in Sand Lake for kids to play on. Then he’ll collect the seeds and leave the pumpkin remains to the moose.

A taco truck exploded early Tuesday morning in Talkeetna. The blast damaged nearby buildings and could be heard miles away.

At around 4:30 a.m., Talkeetna Tako, a food truck that has called Main Street home for years, exploded, sending debris dozens of yards away. Windows in surrounding businesses were shattered, and items on shelves were thrown to the floor. The door of the trailer was found across the street on the roof of another food truck near the beer garden of the Fairview Inn. The Fairview had many of its front-facing windows shattered.

Immediately behind Talkeetna Tako is a residence owned by the Sheldon family. Reportedly, the home suffered significant damage.  The Sheldons were not home at the time. Part of the roof of the truck landed in the Sheldons’ back yard.

Talkeetna Fire Chief Eric Chappel says a propane leak with an unknown ignition source caused the blast.

Cleanup began shortly after the explosion. By 9:00 a.m., almost all of the debris and glass had been cleared from the street. In addition to Talkeetna Tako’s owners, multiple locals turned up to help clear the debris.

No one was injured in the explosion. Talkeetna Tako’s owner, John Krattinger, says the business is insured.

Continuing rains this summer could produce significant flooding in parts of Southcentral Alaska this weekend, as a cool wet streak continues across the region into next week.

The National Weather Service’s Anchorage office issued a flood watch, one step short of a warning, for most of Southcentral from 4 p.m. Friday through Saturday evening.

“Flooding caused by excessive rainfall continues to be possible,” it says.

The watch calls for peak amounts of 2 to 4 inches of rain in mountains north of Turnagain Arm, with 0.7 to 1.5 inches in populated areas such as the Anchorage Bowl, Matanuska Valley and western Kenai Peninsula.

NWS meteorologist Michael Kutz said Friday morning that several Southcentral weather stations ranging from Talkeetna to Portage had recorded more than an inch of rain over the past 24 hours. Koliganek, on the Alaska Peninsula, had already seen nearly 2.5 inches of rain, with 2.2 inches recorded in Cordova.

Kutz credited the scale of the rainfall to the ongoing interplay of a high-pressure and a low-pressure system over the Pacific Ocean, delivering a near-constant deluge to the region this summer.

“It’s basically because of the geographic size of this thing, forcing a lot of the systems to curl up and come through the Gulf of Alaska and ultimately over us here in Southcentral,” he said.

The cool summer has been a boon to wildfire crews across the state, although it’s been more of a cruel summer for peony growers whose cash crops of the flower have suffered under the unusual conditions.

Any flooding that occurs this weekend, according to Kutz, would have its greatest effect in smaller creeks that might overrun their banks. The effects could be compounded along Anchorage’s Campbell and Chester creeks, which pass through paved urban areas less able to absorb floodwaters.

“An inch of rain, over one acre of ground, will produce over 27,000 gallons of water,” Kutz said. “And we have a whole lot of acres over just the plain Anchorage area, much less than the rest of Southcentral Alaska.”

Anchorage’s local forecast calls for rain nearly every day until at least Thursday. But Kutz said sporadic breaks in the pattern should offer residents some relief.

“Into Sunday, we’ll see a very brief pause, and then we’ll start building back up with the next impulse,” Kutz said. “Basically, if you look at that flow between the high and the low, what we get is little ripples in the system.”

Anchorage’s ombudsman is recommending that the city’s IT director be fired for his role in a challenge to this year’s city election.

Ombudsman Darrel Hess also says he believes there may have been a violation of state election law, and he’s forwarding his findings to the state Office of Special Prosecutions, according to his final investigative report released last week.

Hess’ investigation stems from an election complaint filed on April 11 by Sami Graham, a former chief of staff to Mayor Dave Bronson. In her complaint, Graham cited a policy that required an IT staff member be present or give approval for all insertions of USB devices into “critical” municipal computers. That policy had just been finalized the day of her complaint — a week after election day — and was not public at the time. City records show IT director Marc Dahl emailed it to Graham. The policy was also not approved using city rules for new policies, Bronson officials said last month.

Hess began investigating the incident after it was first reported by the Anchorage Daily News in May, and a constituent filed a complaint to him. In his final report, Hess concluded that Dahl was “acquainted with Graham and was feeding her information to assist her in formulating challenges to the April 4th Municipal election.”

Hess wrote that Dahl, “damaged the reputation of the Municipality’s Office of Information Technology,” and should be fired.

Hess also recommended that all city department heads have similar restrictions regarding participating in elections, there should be penalties for tampering with Anchorage’s elections and that all city employees receive annual ethics training. According to Hess’ report, the administration responded affirmatively to the latter two of those recommendations.

Officials with the Bronson administration said Monday that Dahl is still a city employee and has been on administrative leave for several months. They did not say whether the mayor plans on firing Dahl.

Two sheep hunters were rescued near Tonsina last week by an Alaska Air National Guard helicopter crew, after a pilot said they spent about two hours “just hanging on to a cliff face” thousands of feet above the ground.

According to Guard officials, the hunters used an InReach satellite device to report Friday evening that they were trapped on the cliff near Tonsina, about 165 miles east of Anchorage.

Guard Capt. Tim Lezama said the call came in at about 6 p.m. Friday after the hunters had followed a sheep onto the cliff, prompting an urgent rescue mission. He said his Pave Hawk helicopter and a rescue plane carrying pararescuemen, or PJs, were scrambled in half an hour from Anchorage’s Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson and made the flight in about 50 minutes.

The hunters had reported that they were wearing camouflage, which Lezama said made spotting them on the 6,000-foot-high cliff difficult.

“They were pretty much on the cliff’s face,” Lezama said. “Like the way the PJ described it was, they pretty much had a foot on a rock and they were just holding on.”

The helicopter crew opted against immediately hovering over the cliff, Lezama said, due to fears of rotor wash blowing the hunters off its face. Instead, the two PJs first secured belay lines at the top of the cliff and draped them over the edge, giving the hunters something to hold on to during the rescue.

Then the Pave Hawk lowered one of the PJs to the cliff on a line, where he hoisted up one of the hunters before the other PJ hoisted the second hunter. Lezama said it was a 140-foot vertical lift each time.

“Within 15-ish minutes, 15, 20 minutes of us getting there on scene, we were hoisting them off,” he said.

After a midair refueling from the rescue plane, the Pave Hawk’s crew was able to drop the hunters off with an Alaska State Trooper near the trailhead where parked. Neither of them was injured.

Although Lezama has been flying in Alaska for six years, conducting another cliff rescue of an injured hiker the day before the Tonsina flight, he said the hunters’ position was uniquely precarious.

“We were all amazed at the situation they were in to begin with, because they were pretty much just hanging on to a cliff face,” he said. “There was nowhere for them to really go, outside of us picking them off that cliff face.”

Lezama credited the hunters’ decision to carry a satellite communicator – rather than just a cellphone, which can’t summon help in vast areas of Alaska’s backcountry beyond cell tower coverage – with saving their lives. Precise coordinates provided by the device also helped Guardsmen locate the duo despite their camouflage.

In addition, he had high praise for the hunters’ stamina during the rescue.

“That was impressive to us also, that they were able to just hang on for that long,” Lezama said.

JBER’s Alaska Rescue Coordination Center oversaw the rescue, which involved personnel from the Guard’s 210th, 211th and 212th Rescue Squadrons.

Alaska researchers say most of Anchorage is safe from the threat of a tsunami, but they warn that such a wave could affect Girdwood, Hope and some other coastal areas, including the Port of Alaska, under certain conditions.

That’s according to first-of-its-kind tsunami hazard modeling of Upper Cook Inlet in a report out Wednesday from the Alaska Earthquake Center, the state Division of Geological and Geophysical Surveys and the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

The risk of a tsunami hitting Anchorage – Alaska’s largest city, at the head of Cook Inlet – has been the subject of debate for years. After several nearby earthquakes in the past decade, there’s been uncertainty around alerts warning residents that they are in danger. In the past, geologists have said the majority of Anchorage residents are safe from a tsunami, but there had never been a thorough study until the one released Wednesday, which includes detailed and updated inundation maps.

“One major thing that this report does is dispel the myth that there is zero chance a tsunami could reach Anchorage. We know that that’s not true,” state Earthquake and Tsunami Hazards Program Manager Barrett Salisbury said. “There are low-lying coastal areas that will potentially be inundated above high tide. But thankfully the majority of homeowners in Anchorage and people will not need to worry about their homes or their properties.”

According to the report, if a big enough earthquake hit in the right location at the right time – specifically, when there is a high tide in Upper Cook Inlet – a tsunami could overrun parts of the coast in the Anchorage area, including at the Port of Alaska and along Ship, Chester and Fish creeks. And the report notes that an earthquake could trigger a localized landslide in Cook Inlet, which itself could cause a fast-moving tsunami.

The study authors said in a press conference Wednesday that the potential tsunami impacts to the port are unclear and would require more research. About 75% of all water-bourne freight to Alaska enters the state through the Port of Alaska, in Anchorage.

People near any coastline when a big earthquake hits should always be concerned about a potential tsunami, the researchers said.

Still, in Anchorage, there would likely be plenty of time to warn people about an earthquake-generated tsunami, because, according to the report, Cook Inlet’s shallow water would make for a slow-moving wave.

The report authors modeled Alaska’s magnitude 9.2 1964 Good Friday Earthquake – the second-largest earthquake ever recorded – and found that a 10-foot wave likely hit the city’s coastline more than eight hours after the earthquake. But that tsunami went undetected, the report says, because it came in the middle of the night and coincided with an outgoing tide, which lessened the tsunami’s effect.

In a hypothetical, worst-case scenario described in the report, a large earthquake could strike at the entrance to Cook Inlet as the tide is coming in, causing strong currents and high water. The new inundation maps show the most acute impacts would be flooding in the Turnagain Arm communities of Girdwood and Hope and across the Knik Arm from Anchorage in the Point MacKenzie area.

Despite ongoing and widespread confusion from tsunami warnings buzzing residents’ phones – caused by “overalerting,” as one researcher put it – large earthquakes in the region will continue to trigger alerts for the entire Anchorage area, for the time being.

Dave Snider, warning coordinator with the National Tsunami Warning Center in Alaska, said his agency is working to solve that problem.

“So today, we’re limited by the ability to specifically warn very targeted parts of our geography,” Snider said. “And in the future, we’ll be able to warn very specific parts of our coastline, including the Anchorage coastline. But right now, the limitations that we have will likely alert a lot more people than actually need to move away from the coast.”