Western

Veterinarians will be on the Yukon River next week to vaccinate, spay and neuter dogs.

Angie Fitch is director for Alaska Native Rural Veterinary, one of the groups teaming up to give the free clinics.

“It reduces the number of unwanted litters of puppies, there will be fewer strays. It’s a public health issue,” Fitch says.

Most Alaska villages don’t have regular vet visits. A trip to the vet in urban Alaska can cost several hundred dollars and require multiple flights.

Two veterinarians from the Lower 48 and another will join Environmental Health Officer Brian Berube from the Yukon Kuskokwim Health Corporation. He says rabies, which is found in the YK Delta fox population, presents one of the most serious risks with dog bites.

“Especially this time of year when people are out running around and there’s new batches of puppies, we see a pretty big increase in dog bites that we can’t track. Rabies is a disease that, once humans get it, they’re dead. There’s no treating it once the symptoms have started,” Berube says.

Up to 200 dog bites are reported each year in the region and many more go unreported. The majority bitten are kids under the age of 10.

“Another reason you don’t want stray dogs is because they’re filthy. They get into trash, sewage and dead animals. And as you can imagine, kids like to play with the animals, they get germs and all sorts of illnesses from handling stray dogs,” Berube says.

The team will visit Mountain Village beginning June 21st and move on to St. Mary’s, Pitka’s Point, Pilot Station and Marshall.

 

The city of Nome is considering creating a registry of vacant properties in the city and a list of maintenance requirements for property owners.

With one-third of the buildings in Nome vacant, City Planner Eileen Bechtol said dealing with abandoned structures is the number one request from the public after a citywide survey last August.

Building inspector Greg Smith says the registry is also about public safety.

The city needs “maintenance and security requirements in order to protect the public, which we don’t have on the books anywhere,” Smith said.

“And the police are responding more and more to young kids, going into vacant buildings, playing with matches … we got a problem!”

Smith said the registry would give the city a list of whom to contact for any issues that might come up involving abandoned buildings. The city would also lay out maintenance regulations, for example: what a property owner would be responsible for after a fire in or near one of the derelict structures. Smith said similar registries have been used successfully in other Alaska communities.

The city planning commission’s docket included additional language that could fill gaps in Nome’s city code, Smith said. “It also goes into definitions of junk, debris, how you can leave a lot … stuff we don’t have.”

In a meeting, council members countered that it’s tricky business to define “junk” or “debris” in a town like Nome. Some said the new rules could be incentives to clean up properties or even leverage favorable property tax rates on structures that aren’t abandoned.

The vacant building registry is just a first step, the start of a conversation. The city is also considering strengthening the city’s rules on grandfathering property to comply with the community’s relatively new zoning laws established in 2007.

 

North America’s largest land animal has made it to the Kuskokwim.

Most of the wood bison released in early April are still in the area around Shageluk, but one group of twenty-five broke off to explore southward and have scattered over an 80-mile area. One of the larger groups can be seen in the area around Holy Cross while one lone wanderer was seen in the area between Aniak and Kalskag.

Cathie Harms is a Wildlife Biologist with Fish and Game who has been part of the project to reintroduce wood bison to Alaska.

“The more they travel and the more they learn the expanse of their habitat and what kind of ground is out there, the better
they’re going to be prepared to survive the coming winters, Harns said. “So it’s a very, very good thing for the established population that they learn this kind of experience by moving around.”

In early April one hundred wood bison were released in Shageluk, Alaska. Seventy-five were cows, twenty-five of whom we pregnant, and the rest were juvenile bulls. In late May an additional twelve mature bulls were sent
out.

“The bison were released near Shageluk and since then they have been eating the grasses and sedges that are in the areas
that have greened up. It’s just brought them a whole bunch of energy and many of them are really exploring the habitat that’s around there.”

Wood bison are the largest land animals in North America, with bulls weighing on average 2,250 pounds. For tens of thousands of years, bison lived in Alaska, filling a role in the ecological system as grazers. They disappeared from the state between one and two hundred years ago.

At this time it is illegal to kill the bison, but hunting will happen once the population can sustain it.

“Hunting has always been part of the plan, but we have to wait until the herd can provide a harvest without stopping its
growth,” Harms said.

“It depends on how many they produce and how the survival is. We don’t know if hunting with be able to be allowed within five years, 10 years, 15 years or 20; it just depends on how they do. But certainly we worked with residents of the GASH region, residents of Southwest Alaska, residents of Anchorage and Fairbanks to put together a
management plan that does allow for hunting.”

This year, biologists estimate that more than twelve calves have been born in the wild. The herds will most likely meet back up again in late July and August for the breeding season.

Diesel fuel leaking from a storage tank along a road in Wales has been contained, according to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

On June 4th, an employee with the Wales Native Corporation came upon the spillage beside the Kingkinkgin Road, 150 feet from the Bering Sea. The leaking, out-of-service tank could hold 22-thousand gallons of fuel – when it was found, only about 300 gallons remained. But Ashley Adamczak with ADEC says it’s unknown how much fuel was in the tank when the leak began.

The spill was caused by corrosion on the single-wall tank, which ADEC patched the following day. Adamczak says responders removed the remaining 300 gallons of fuel, and oily water from an adjacent tank. The next step will be discarding the containers and conducting a site assessment to gauge how far contamination spread through the soil. So far, there have been no reports of impacts to wildlife or the shoreline.

ADEC is developing a cleanup plan. For questions, or to provide information, you can call 907-451-2126.

Monday marked the final deadline to vacate one of Nome’s more infamous housing projects.

“If you’re into indoor plumbing, and you’re into nice hot showers after work every day, and you’re into not ever being cold – then living on West Beach is definitely not for you,” said Ian Foster, who has lived in Nome for the past six years.

He spent three of those years living in one of the more comfortable-looking shelters on West Beach, a plywood cabin with propane heaters and two big picture windows. Foster has since upgraded to a place with running water, but says the cabin and its beach-front property — which he leases from Nome Gold Alaska — still holds a special place in his, and Nome’s, history.

“A hundred years ago this beach had 30,000 people on it,” he said. “In tents, much like the shacks that you see right now. Now it’s actually changing. It’s actually coming to an end, this part of current history that we were able to live and experience.”

The impromptu mining camp has existed, in one form or another, for several decades despite shifting land ownership, and varying degrees of approval for would-be tenants. The current property owner, Nome Gold, officially opened the beach — along with another tract of land near the defunct Dredge 6 — for two-year leases in 2013.

“Unfortunately, that area didn’t work out very well,” said Nome Gold general manager Randy Powelson. “Some of the people didn’t behave very well, there were sanitation issues out there, trash storage issues. Pretty much turned into a free for all.”

Powelson said the company’s decision not to renew those leases was three-fold. First, the property was difficult to manage — a seasonal population and lack of identifiable house markers made distinguishing between leaseholders and squatters next to impossible.

Second, he says, Nome Gold plans to make “industrial use” of the area for mining as early as 2017. And third, the beach shelters fall within the city’s flood plane — a point that Nome city manager Josie Bahnke said the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was quick to make with city officials during its last inspection.

“Basically, they were built kind of out-of-sight-out-of-mind,” said Bahnke of the cabins on West Beach. “The folks constructing them didn’t follow the city’s building permit [or] flood plain permit.”

Bahnke said FEMA warned the city that semi-permanent structures on West Beach were a liability, and an order trickled down: Get rid of them.

But for beach residents that may be easier said than done. Foster explained the camp on West Beach isn’t simply historic, it provides a crucial alternative for miners too cash-strapped for Nome’s expensive housing market.

“I’m paying a thousand bucks a month for a little studio. And it’s not that big, it’s not that fancy, it’s just a studio, and this isn’t New York. So why am I paying a thousand bucks? That’s just what housing costs up here,” he said.

Powelson acknowledged that Nome’s steep housing prices are a problem, but said that problem “isn’t really Nome Gold’s responsibility to solve.” Instead, he said, it’s going to take a group effort to find workable solutions.

“It’s also going to take the dredging community to, not only police themselves, but take personal responsibility that we wouldn’t be in this mess if there hadn’t been some unfortunate individuals who made it not work for everybody,” Powelson concluded.

Foster agrees that some may have taken advantage of the housing arrangement on West Beach, but he thinks finger pointing is counterproductive.

“If we categorize any population in Nome as partly destructive, therefore all destructive, therefore they shouldn’t be here — that argument is awful,” said Foster, who plans to focus on the positive aspects of West Beach’s legacy.

“West Beach was an awesome, awesome period of my life. It was a type of deliberate living that I was really seeking. And I loved it. And, you know, they can’t take that away. Because that’s experiential. It’s in me. It’s already there; it stuck,” he said.

As for what a move closer to town will do for others in the mining community, Foster laughs: “Hopefully it doesn’t civilize us too much. We’re a wild bunch.”

One of two companies seeking to open a liquor store in Bethel is withdrawing its application for the moment. The city hasn’t had a liquor store in four decades.

Seth Madole from the Alaska Commercial Company spoke before the Bethel City Council in their regular Tuesday meeting. He cited the community’s sensitivity to alcohol and the upcoming advisory vote.

“AC will reapply for a package liquor license in the community of Bethel, when votes in favor of alcohol sales in October,” said Madole.

The council protested the AC license application this spring, and that of the Bethel Native Corporation’s Bethel Spirits LLC, citing the 2010 advisory vote and the stores’ proximity to churches and schools. City code currently prohibits liquor sales within 200 feet of schools and churches.

The city has an advisory vote scheduled for this October. The state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board will consider the applications this summer.

Ana Hoffman, President and CEO of the Bethel Native Corporation has argued that the proposed store in the former new Swanson’s location is fully legal. She asked the city council to reconsider.

“It is time we confront these difficult questions with rational minds. You as council members have a duty to review the application with logic and reason. I don’t think Bethel Spirits has been afforded that basic expectation by the majority members of this council because it’s uncomfortable,” said Hoffman.

The council did not discuss the issue further.