Western

The City of Bethel is organizing to combat a growing heroin problem. Tuesday night the Bethel City Council directed the city manager and her team to develop an action plan and partner with community leaders to take on illicit narcotics.

City Council Member Byron Maczynski, who recently received a death threat for publicly talking about Bethel’s heroin issue, brought forward the initiative.

“Sometimes it’s too late but it’s not late for a lot of people out there. We can really help these people,” Maczynski said. “I hope the community can come together. It’s sad and we need to do something.”

The action memorandum asks the city manager, and top staff like the police and fire chief, to work with local and regional players to develop a comprehensive community plan. It mentions anonymous reporting systems, teaching people to identify those who need help and how to find it. It cites support groups, which Maczynski plans to begin this week.

Doreen O’Brien, who runs the pre-maternal home for expectant mothers, has seen the effect on families. She told the council that responsibility goes beyond the community’s organizations.

“But it’s also our community and it’s up to us to police the playgrounds and to police the places around town. If we don’t have enough cops, then hire them, bring in the FBI, bring in special agents. We count. We hear about the big cities where ‘police lives count,’ ‘these lives count.’ Our lives count too,” O’Brien said.

Councilman Mark Springer said Bethel is dealing with a criminal enterprise stretching far past the city limits. To be effective, he says the city should connect with law enforcement at all levels.

“We would be happy to see as much law enforcement pressure brought to bear against people who are importing narcotics into Bethel and selling them here,” Springer said. “As I said before, it’s criminal conspiracy and organized crime in no uncertain terms.”

 

 

Three people contracted botulism after eating separate batches of fermented seal flipper in Koyuk last weekend.

Alaska’s Division of Public Health says the first case presented signs of the illness on Friday May 8, with two more becoming sick by the following Monday afternoon. All three were transported to Anchorage for emergency medical treatment, and officials say an investigation to “identify and monitor” others who may be at risk is currently underway.

Botulism is a life-threatening disease caused by bacteria that can incubate in some traditional Alaska Native foods — including fermented seal flipper and fermented fish heads.

The cases in Koyuk come after a botulism outbreak last fall that killed one and sickened two others near Lower Kalskag in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region. The Alaska Dispatch News reported that death was the first to be caused by botulism in Alaska for over a decade.

Officials are urging health care providers to immediately report suspected cases so that they can be treated quickly, and others can be prevented from eating contaminated food. Symptoms of the illness include a dry mouth, blurry vision, dizziness, stomach pain, nausea or difficulty breathing.

 

Special Olympics athletes from across the state will compete for the Fifth Annual Bethel Unified Invitational. Bethel Regional High School organized the three-on-three basketball tournament in partnership with Special Olympics Alaska.

Students from Bethel, and seven other communities as near as Kwethluk and as far as Barrow will take to the court.

A total of 58 students will compete. The three person teams consist of two Special Olympians.

Special Olympics’ mission is to provide children and adults who have intellectual disabilities with year-round sports training.

The opening ceremony for the tournament will be at 6:30 p.m. on Friday in the BRHS gym. The games will start at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday and go until 5:00 p.m.

Even rural communities that have raised the money to build modern sanitation systems face the threat of their ultimate failure due to the lack of funding for operations and maintenance, wiping away whatever health gains were achieved.

The Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation Environmental Health and Engineering Department provides technical assistance to water treatment plant operators in the region. Here’s a bit of the conversation during a recent teleconference.

“I don’t know if any of them are working,” said one of the operators. A YKHC employee replied, “Yeah, it’s just that temperature sensor on … “

One of the issues that comes up is the lack of funding for minor repairs.

“If we could spend a thousand dollars to save 24, that’d be great,” the conversation continued.

Big savings could be achieved by cutting energy use – 40 percent of operating costs.

Kwethluk, also in southwest Alaska, is getting a new piped water and sewer system. At the new Kwethluk water plant, YKHC Remote Maintenance Worker Bob White says new boilers used to heat water there use about half as much fuel as older ones, but he says they’re out of reach for many villages.

“Sometimes they just don’t have the cash to make the jump to buy into the new equipment, to buy the new controls,” said White. “This thing has a little computerized control that automatically has turned the boiler temperature down because it’s warmer out today.”

Back in 1995 the southwest Alaska village of Tuntutuliak got a new water and sewer system too. Villagers saw dozens of homes fitted with tanks to store water and waste. Workers could deliver water and pick up sewage in tanks hauled by snow-machines or ATVs.

But resident Robert Enoch says water delivery stopped a few years ago.

“The water delivery vehicles, the haul tanks, don’t work anymore. The only thing that works is the sewer haul, the pump-out systems.”

That leaves villagers hauling water or ice for household use… and cutting back to less water use than needed for the frequent hand washing needed to prevent the spread of viruses and bacteria.

Labor makes up 44 percent of operating costs so the village hired only part-time workers. It charged people about five percent of the median household income. In some villages fees are as much as seven percent. Urban Alaskans pay less than one percent. But without the economies of scale that come with larger populations, the village couldn’t replace equipment.

And rural systems are aging out. Gavin Dixon is Rural Energy Project Manager for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. Speaking to legislators from rural Alaska, he said the average age of rural water plants is 23 years, more than their expected design life of 20 years.

“A lot of these systems are already at the end of their useful life,” said Dixon. “There’s some of these plant operators that don’t even want to open or close a valve because of the fear it could result in a catastrophic issue there.”

YKHC Environmental Health and Engineering Director Brian Lefferts says the state government already supports energy, communications, and infrastructure. The only public utility, he says, that isn’t subsidized is water and sewer.

“If we had something like power cost equalization for sanitation,” said Lefferts, “where people could pay rates similar to what they pay on the road system or in the rail belt communities. We’d have a lot more systems that are online and not struggling with the problems that they have now.”

The state has long shared oil revenues with municipalities, and in many small towns and villages, those revenues make up the lion’s share of local budgets. But with the price of oil half what it was a year ago, legislators have taken steps to end the municipal revenue sharing program that got its start in 1970, further reducing available funds for water and sewer operations and maintenance.

There’s got to be a better way. We’ll hear about some proposed alternatives in the next segment of “Kick the Bucket.”

Most of us have never lived with without running water at home. Today, we’ll learn about some people who are just getting used to it, and others who would like to get used to having running water. In the second segment of the series Kick the Bucket, we’ll also hear some of the reasons Alaska hasn’t made modern plumbing a simple fact of life for all Alaskans.

Dan Winkleman, the president of the Yukon Kuskokwim Health Corporation (YKHC), described a recent phone call from his mother-in-law in Kwethluk.

“She said, ‘Guess what?’ ‘So I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘I just finished doing the dishes in my sink with the water from the faucet and I wanted to let you know how exciting that was.’ She was giddy with excitement,” said Winkelman.

What’s so exciting about washing dishes? Kwethluk never had running water before. It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t cheap: a water treatment plant, water tank and sewage lagoon cost $41 million.

That’s a lot of money — but this is rural Alaska. Weather can wreak havoc with schedules. Getting anything here is expensive, especially heavy equipment. And, piped water and sewer means digging trenches for pipes and pumps, plus installing plumbing in individual homes. But Kwethluk’s system is costly even for rural Alaska, where piped water and sewer in some communities cost in the three-to-five million dollar range.

YKHC Remote Maintenance Worker Bob White said the Kwethluk treatment plant, which cost $4.2 million, has sophisticated features to reduce maintenance and operations, such as computerized controls and sensors that will send out alerts if something isn’t working as it should. And to avoid the expense of large underground sewage pipes, each home is getting a grinder pump that will move sewage through narrow, 2-inch-pipes.

Hefting the pump on to a piece of plywood, White said, “They’re expensive, and they’re heavy. This one’s brand new.”

And it’s heavy duty.

“Part of the problem, it wouldn’t take the harsh conditions,” said White. “The pump manufacturer actually started making an Arctic version, and this is their Arctic version.”

Driving the half mile from the treatment plant to the sewage lagoon, White said workers dredged a pond 20 feet deep to get the soil used to build the berm around the lagoon. Raw sewage is pumped in, then natural processes take over and break it down. The Kwethluk sewer lagoon cost $7.5 million dollars – but, as White explains, that cost is all up-front.

“The good thing about a lagoon is once you construct it, your costs are pretty much done. The maintenance on this lagoon will be less than $5,000 a year,” said White. “So lagoons are really efficient if you have the land mass.”

Federal and state funding for the Kwethluk project came in increments so construction spanned some 15 years – which also added to the cost.

Fifty miles up the Kuskokwim River, Tuntutuliak, population 400, doesn’t have running water and gets by on what’s called a flush-haul system. Waste from flush toilets goes into a holding tank, then gets hauled away. People have to haul water. Brian Lefferts, director of YKHC’s office of environmental health and engineering, said there’s a public health cost to that.

“In situations like that,” says Lefferts, “we find that people drastically conserve the water and then they don’t realize the health benefits that come with having piped running water and sewer service.”

Lefferts said the decision on which communities get funding for water and sewer projects comes out of a detailed evaluation.

“All the water and sewer, what we call needs in the state, get entered into a database. It’s called a sanitation deficiency system,” said Lefferts. “We have estimated project costs, the number of homes they’d serve, looking at health impact, capital cost, d the current level of service, and then the level of service they’d have after the project.”

Other criteria include how well the community is doing managing what it has – collecting fees, for instance, and getting employees trained and certified.

A 1994 report by the federal Office of Technology Assessment recommended an annual budget of $120 million for rural sanitation in Alaska. Federal and state funding combined never reached that level, and now officials say it will take $900 million to catch up. That’s on top of $2.2 billion dollars spent over the past two decades.

In a recent presentation to state legislators, Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium Sanitation Facilities Program Manager David Bevridge said most of that money has come from federal agencies.

“If you look through the Village Safe Water program, it gets matched with federal dollars on a 25-75 percent ratio,” Bevridge explained. “So for every 25 dollars the federal government will kick in 75 dollars so that’s been a big component of the funding in Alaska.”

In 2014, the state legislature allocated $7.5 million for Village Safe Water, out of a $13 billion state budget, to match $50 million from the Indian Health Service, Environmental Protection Agency, and U.S. Department of Agriculture. But federal funding has dropped by 64 percent in the last ten years. The gap between what’s needed and what’s available is getting wider. And the lack of money for maintenance and operations right now is damaging existing systems. We’ll find out more about that next time.

It’s been four decades since Bethel had a liquor store, and for now, that status will continue. The Bethel City Council voted Tuesday to protest two liquor store license applications from the Bethel Native Corporation’s Bethel Spirits and the Alaska Commercial Company.

Council members cited the loud public outcry against having easier access to alcohol, as well as possible violations of rules against being too close to churches and schools.

When the debate entered the weeds, Council member Chuck Herman added a line to the resolution:

“I just want to make it very clear our protest stands based on the community being opposed to it and not based on any technical violations.”

The vote was 4 to 3.

The state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board is required to honor protests from governing bodies unless they are found to be arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable.

Bethel Native Corporation President and CEO Ana Hoffman insisted the proposed store is legally situated and argued that what Bethel has now is not working.

“The presence of illegal sales is undeniable and not a cent of the sales is taxed. We have quite possibly created the most unhealthy environment imaginable. Allowing for the issuance of a liquor licenses enhances control and regulation over the current system of chaos.”

In an October non-binding advisory vote, Bethel citizens will weigh in on whether they support several categories of liquor licenses. In the same election, they can approve a new 12 percent alcohol sales tax.