Western

The council that manages fishing in federal waters voted this week to link groundfish trawl fishing in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands to halibut abundance. The action caps — at least for now — a six-year debate about curbing halibut bycatch in Alaska.

For many who have been following that debate, the decision comes as a surprise because it’s expected to deal what trawlers say is a crushing blow to their fishery.

But members of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council said it was also important for them to consider how high levels of bycatch hurt small-boat halibut fishermen in Western Alaska — even if they didn’t go quite as far as advocates from those communities had hoped.

The action that ultimately passed Monday came from Rachel Baker, the deputy Fish and Game commissioner who represents Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration on the council. She said it will incentivize the trawl industry to reduce the halibut they incidentally catch in their nets.

When halibut stocks are low, the cap on prohibited species catch, or PSC, will also drop.

“Mr. Chair, this council clearly would rather not impose additional costs that could result in reduced groundfish harvest and revenues, if we had other management options,” Baker said. “But again, halibut is fully used in the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands, and at the low and very low index state, mortality from PSC should decline in response to reduced amounts of halibut available for all users.”

The new limits apply to a group of fishermen and processers called the Amendment 80 fleet, which catch and process groundfish in the Bering Sea.

Halibut is a prohibited species for the fleet and must be discarded. That trawl sector catches the largest amount of halibut bycatch in the region — an estimated 2.8 million pounds each year. Other Bering Sea fishermen say that reduces their opportunities to catch halibut, particularly as spawning halibut stocks decline there.

As it is now, the bycatch cap in place for the fleet is fixed and is not adjusted to halibut abundance. So when halibut abundance is low, bycatch is a larger slice of the overall pie. The last time the cap was changed was five years ago.

The council voted to make that cap dependent on the abundance of halibut in the area. Under the new guidelines, when halibut abundance is high, the fleet could catch the same amount of bycatch it is limited to now. But when halibut abundance is very low, that cap would drop by 35%.

Chris Woodley is executive director of the Groundfish Forum, the fishery association that represents those trawlers. He said the fleet has been working to lower its halibut bycatch already and called Monday’s decision “devastating.”

“Because we’re being told to do better without more tools,” he said. “And that’s going to harm crew members, it’s going to reduce our revenues …. and harm our crewmembers’ families.”

He said without new tools to curb halibut bycatch, the fleet will have to stop fishing earlier in the season to meet those lower caps. Woodley said the 2,200 crew members the fleet employs — many from out of state — will bear much of the impact as the fleet’s fishing opportunities change. Analysis suggests the action will result in tens of millions in losses for the fishery.

Anne Vanderhoeven, a member of the council who works with Arctic Storm Management Group in Seattle, found that concerning.

“I find cuts at the levels in the motion to be punitive — cuts to the Amendment 80 fleet — to reallocate halibut from one user group to another with no real conservation benefit,” Vanderhoeven said. “And cuts at these levels could put some Amendment 80 companies out of business and I don’t think that’s the right thing to be doing here.”

But council members said they’re also taking into account the social and cultural impacts of bycatch.

The halibut fishery in St. Paul, a small island community in the Bering Sea, originated in the 1980s as the commercial seal harvest there was phased out. Today, it’s the primary source of income for the 355 residents there, according to a packet submitted to the council by the Central Bering Sea Fishermen’s Association ahead of the decision.

Lauren Divine, with the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island, said that value is immeasurable — and not purely economic.

“What is the value of the health of the halibut population?” she said. “The Bering Sea ecosystem? The connected, large marine ecosystems of Alaska that are vital to our people, family, communities, business cultures and the nation?”

Divine and other tribal leaders had been pushing for another option this week, Alternative 4, which would have taken an even bigger swing at reducing bycatch. They said that would have also opened up more fishing opportunities for small-boat fishermen like those in St. Paul.

That alternative was also backed by a bipartisan coalition of Alaska legislators and fishermen’s associations across the state, who provided hours of testimony to the council last week.

Marissa Wilson is a member of the council’s advisory panel and a fisherman based in Homer. She said the council’s impact analysis did not take into account the impacts of bycatch on communities around Alaska.

“There are values involved in this decision that are not adequately captured,” she said. ” And there are grave, intergenerational consequences of choosing any alternative besides four.”

The council said it can’t guarantee reducing bycatch will help out halibut fishermen.

It’s actually a different council that manages halibut stocks — the International Pacific Halibut Commission. Commission scientist Allan Hicks told council members changing the cap will have little impact on halibut spawning biomass in the region.

But it will likely change the amount of halibut commercial and subsistence fishermen are able to catch. Council Member Andy Mezirow, a charter operator in Seward, said it’s important to share the burden of halibut conservation between sectors.

“The Amendment 80 fleet may in fact have to face doing more with less,” he said. “But we are moving this action one step closer to having all fishermen share in this burden.”

Mezirow voted “yes” on Monday’s motion, as did the other representatives to the council from Alaska. The motion passed the council 8-3.

Jeff Kauffman is celebrating that decision. He’s the vice president of the Central Bering Sea Fishermen’s Association and a commercial halibut fisherman.

He said while the measure doesn’t go as far as he would’ve liked, it’s an exciting step in the right direction.

“This is a big day for St. Paul and the Indigenous small-boat fishermen that live there,” he said. “Because the halibut fishery is so important for St. Paul, we spent six years and tremendous resources and efforts to get to this better place.”

This week’s decision marks the first time the federal council has linked halibut bycatch to abundance, Mezirow said. The council will likely take up more bycatch issues next year.

NOAA Fisheries will have to review the final action before it goes into effect.

The remote, tiny community of St. Paul is getting a new police chief this week, about a month after the island’s entire police department resigned over a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

“Back in the first part of September, our city council passed a policy requiring all city employees be vaccinated against COVID-19,” said City Manager Phil Zavadil. “All our officers, including our chief, decided they weren’t going to do that, and they resigned.”

In total, nine city workers resigned or were fired because of the vaccine requirement, Zavadil said: two from the public works department and seven from the public safety department. Those seven people made up the island’s entire police department and EMS.

“As far as leaving, I would say, that’s their choice,” Zavadil said. “We needed to do what we needed to do to protect our community and our employees.”

Since their resignations, Zavadil said the city has contracted with Delta Medical Transport to provide emergency medical services in St. Paul, which is in the Bering Sea about 250 miles north of the Aleutian Chain. EMTs will rotate in and out of the community every month or so.

The city also currently has two police officers on the island. One was hired in late October, and one is on loan from the City of Unalaska.

The new police chief, Michael Castro, is moving to St. Paul from Utah with his two sons this week, said Zavadil.

“He’s been an officer and a former police chief before,” he said. “He was also in fire and EMS service for a long period of time. So he has kind of a good holistic background in public safety that we thought would work here.”

Zavadil said he was slightly concerned about filling the vacant department, but the search for new employees has gone relatively smoothly.

“It was a difficult time for us to go through, but I think we found people fairly quickly,” he said. “We’re still looking for some people, but we’re in a good position right now.”

The city is looking to hire two more police officers with experience, who, Zavadil said, won’t have to go to the police academy and will be a good fit for the community.

So far, 79% of St. Paul residents are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. The city still requires testing before and after travel, as well as quarantine for both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.

The island community of 355 people has recorded just seven cases of the virus to date.

More than 800 Alaskans have died of COVID-19 since early 2020. We asked readers and listeners to tell us about the lives of some of those Alaskans, and they responded.

John Redmond Evans Sr. of Kotzebue, known to many of his friends and family as “Johnny Red,” died from COVID-19 on Aug. 2, 2020. He was 77 years old.

Born in Galena in 1943, Evans got an electrician’s degree in Kansas. That’s where he met his wife, Sophie, whom he married in 1965 and started a family with in Kotzebue.

Evans held many jobs around Alaska, including with the state Department of Transportation, and was an assistant chief at the Kotzebue Fire Department.

His youngest daughter, Suzanne, says his work ethic was matched by his care for his family — and that many of her favorite memories of him involve holiday gatherings.

Listen here:

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Suzanna Evans: My dad, Jonathan Sr., was a kind, caring, loving, supportive father — very devoted to his children and his wife. I’m the youngest of the girls. I’m the middle child of the family, and he also raised a nephew that was like his son that lives up in Kotzebue with us.

He loved going to family gatherings and, most of all, spending time with his immediate family and his brothers and his sister. We always flew over to Galena, Alaska, to spend Thanksgiving and Christmases with my dad’s side of the family. That was very nice.

He was only working to provide for the family, to pay bills, to put bread and butter on the table, to buy stove oil and buy stuff for school and make sure that we had a warm house and things to eat every day. He was a very good provider.

When we went to Galena to visit the other kids, we’d always go back to the base and watch movies during Christmas time. And ride around on sno-gos and walk around town and go to the store and buy ice cream and then go back to my grandpa’s house or my uncle’s house and stay in and watch Christmas movies and look at presents under the tree and look at all the lights. We were happy kids, excited to be around my dad’s side of the family for the holidays.

When we were living out in Muldoon, my dad had a fun thing of doing. He’d know I was sleeping in the bedroom, and then he’d pretend that he and mom were getting ready to leave, and they weren’t dressed up yet. And he’d say, “Well Sophie are you ready, OK, let’s go!” And he’d walk out into the living room with mom, and I’d be in my bed, and I’d hear them and pop up. And they’d be in the kitchen and I’d run out really fast. And then my dad would start smiling and say, “Sue, I was just trying to get you up! I know it’s early.”

On Nov. 15, Akiak made history as the first community in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta to install broadband internet in every home. But the rollout has not been smooth, and many in the village still don’t have high-speed internet. The satellite internet provider says that they’re still in beta testing.

Akiak Chief Mike Williams Sr. said that the new broadband internet service installed last month is only working part of the time.

“Twenty-five to 50% of the time that I’ve noticed when I tried, but it has been spotty, so I haven’t really tracked it,” Williams Sr. said.

Kevin Hamer, the CEO and President of Akiak Technology, the tribally owned company the village created to manage its broadband, said that there have been periods when residents have been able to use high-speed internet, but they have been brief.

“It has been up for anywhere from four minutes to 40 minutes at a time, then it would go down; we would lose signal.” Hamer said. “And I’m not painting a rosy picture. This first month of initial rollout period is choppy. It’s a rough patch.”

But he said that these hiccups are to be expected during the launch of a project this large.

“Anytime you do a major technology rollout, there’s absolutely bug fixes, defects, software updates needed,” Hamer said.

Hamer said that the bugs are not local to Akiak. The village’s broadband is beamed in by satellites owned by a company called OneWeb. November wasn’t just the launch of Akiak’s broadband. It was the launch of OneWeb’s service worldwide, and Hamer said that the company has been working through initial kinks.

“OneWeb is working this worldwide. It’s not an Akiak issue,” Hamer said.

OneWeb executive Chris McLaughlin called KYUK from the company’s headquarters in the United Kingdom. He confirmed that there are bugs the company is working out, but that was expected. He said that Nov. 15 wasn’t the launch of full service, but the start of beta testing.

“Perhaps something got a bit lost in translation into, ‘Nov. 15, we’re up and running,’” McLaughlin said. “But actually, we at OneWeb have not said, ‘Here we are, gold standard broadband from the 15th.’”

OneWeb is rolling out some bug fixes this week that it hopes will improve service in Akiak, but McLaughlin does not have a specific date that the company plans to move out of beta testing and into full service.

“Will that be within four weeks? I’d like to think so. But I haven’t been told that. So I will just tell you, it will be happening fast because it’s in everybody’s interest to make it happen fast,” McLaughlin said.

While OneWeb is in beta testing, it is not charging its customers. Similarly, Akiak is not charging residents for the spotty broadband right now. Even if OneWeb moves out of beta testing soon, Akiak will not charge residents for internet service for a full year.

Williams Sr. said that the slow start is all part of the process.

“A lot of people might be a little disappointed,” Williams Sr. said. “But we have to be very patient in getting the glitches worked out. And I know that it’s going to get better and better as we move along here.”

The rest of the Y-K Delta will be watching closely, as dozens of communities are planning to use the same broadband technology as Akiak.

This story originally appeared in the Washington Post Magazine. It aimed to bring the issue of existential environmental threats, which Napakiak and many other communities in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta face, to a national audience.

On the first day of school in August, Principal Sally Benedict gathered her 22 high school students to explain why they had moved from their K-12 school into a detached portable unit next door. “Technically, you guys are called displaced children,” Benedict said. “We’re doing this because of the erosion.” The William Miller Memorial School in Napakiak, a Yup’ik village on a small island in Western Alaska, is tucked in a bend of the longest free-flowing river in the United States: the Kuskokwim. The river provides the lifeblood for Napakiak’s 370 residents, but now also threatens their existence.

How long would they be in the portable building? asked one student. Until a new school is built, Benedict replied.

During high tide, the river is only 64 feet from the high-schoolers’ original classroom and gets closer by the day. On windy days, waves crash against the shore where students used to play, battering it until the land relents and crumbles. Exposed roots of willow trees and broken slabs of mud hang off the riverbank, telltale signs of erosion. The school district plans to demolish the school, or at least part of it, during this academic year before the river swallows it up.

Some students aren’t waiting around to watch that happen. The day before school started, Madison Andrew, 14, embraced her mom ahead of an approximately 12-mile boat ride to Bethel, a hub city of about 6,300 people. Uncertain whether she would have a school to attend if she stayed, she had transferred schools, leaving behind her friends, her family, and her community. “She’s pretty much my right arm, my right leg, my left arm, my left leg,” said Andrew’s mother, Jackie Grey. “She does everything from helping in the house to being there for me. So it’s like a big piece of my heart is being ripped.”

Once the school is gone, the heart of the community will be missing too. As the village’s largest building, the school hosted everything from sled-dog-racing award ceremonies, to funerals, to basketball games. In the event of spring floods, when the frozen river would thaw faster than it could drain, residents would gather in the school’s gym.

The Kuskokwim River has been eating away at Napakiak for decades; the community is accustomed to moving homes back when the water gets too close. But the school is too big to move, and the river is approaching too fast, accelerated by climate change. In a region warming two to three times faster than the rest of the world, the village is losing ground three times faster than it was 10 years ago, according to studies of Napakiak’s erosion.

The village’s senior Elder, Annie Nelson, who is 90 years old and stands under 5 feet tall, remembers sitting in a circle as a little girl with her elders. They told her that Napakiak would suffer this fate. “When the people begin to change in attitude and love starts to get cold, they predicted the weather will begin to change and erosion will start happening and people will start moving,” she tells me in Yup’ik through an interpreter. Yup’ik, meaning “real person,” refers to both a group of Alaska Native people primarily residing in Western Alaska and their Indigenous language. Although most adult villagers speak Yup’ik and English, Annie is one of the few people left in the village who exclusively speaks her native tongue.

As we speak, Annie’s great-granddaughters clean wild berries and greens they had harvested to prepare a dessert called akutaq. The young girls are continuing their ancestral traditions on their ancestral lands, a lifestyle revolving around fishing, hunting, and gathering. “They have always been here. They belong to this land. This land is their food,” 81-year-old Jacob Black, the second-oldest of the village Elders, says of the community in Napakiak.

But their lifestyle has changed in some ways too. The Yup’ik people weren’t always as stationary as they are now. They moved with the seasons, from fish camps in early summer, to berry camps in late summer, to hunting camps in the fall. “Our Elders were living their ways of life, what they call nomads,” says Black. “They move from this place to this place, where everything was abundant. That cycle, I’ll never forget.”

Their nomadic way of life changed when the United States began to enforce the requirement that Yup’ik children attend school in Western Alaska, sometime after World War II. Along with churches, schools affixed families to a single location, transforming seasonal camps into permanent, year-round communities. Now, some of those villages face the threat of being wiped away by climate change, and residents say that the government, which helped anchor them there, is not doing enough to protect them.

While growing up in Napakiak, 61-year-old Walter Nelson heard the Elders’ climate change prophecies from his mother, Annie. Now, white-haired himself, he is the coordinator of the village’s 173-page Napakiak Managed Retreat Plan, a detailed 50-year plan to move the entire community to a safe and sustainable location. The retreat is estimated to cost more than $100 million, and the village has secured less than 10% of that amount.

Nelson says that’s due to barriers that essentially exclude Alaska Native villages from funding sources. Some grants require fund-matching, and others call for the community to have its own heavy machinery. He says that Napakiak, where the median household income, according to the U.S. Census, is less than half the national average, simply doesn’t have the resources to manage those grant application requirements or the overhead they’d demand. To Nelson, the biggest challenge is cobbling together dozens of small grants, typically several hundred thousand dollars each. “You’re applying for this mini grant, instead of getting one big federal or state grant to take care of all your needs,” he explains.

The 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill includes $216 million in federal funding to help tribes adapt to or relocate away from environmentally vulnerable areas. That figure pales in comparison to the $4.5 billion that the Alaska Federation of Natives estimates is needed to protect Alaska Native communities’ infrastructure over the next 50 years. And not only does the infrastructure bill’s funding for climate resilience efforts fall short in terms of dollars, says Max Neale, a senior program manager for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium’s Center for Environmentally Threatened Communities, but these efforts also perpetuate programs that often ignore Alaska’s tribes. “The infrastructure bill largely provides funding to existing programs with inequitable regulatory barriers and program designs that disadvantage or exclude our communities,” Neale wrote in an email.

Napakiak is one of 73 remote Alaskan communities facing the highest level of threat due to erosion, flooding, and permafrost degradation, according to the 2019 Denali Commission Statewide Threat Assessment. Most are small Alaska Native villages. Newtok, a village in the same region that is also being displaced by a river, decided to move the entire community to another location 9 miles away. That process began decades ago and is only halfway done.

There are cars and small trucks traveling on the frozen Kuskokwim River around Bethel, but don’t call it an ice road yet.

“There is no ice road right now,” said Mark Leary, a Bethel Search and Rescue member and the Village of Napaimute’s operations director. “We don’t call it an ice road until it’s marked and plowed, if needed. And there’s responsible entities for keeping it maintained. Right now it’s just a truck trail.”

The Village of Napaimute, which has maintained the ice road in recent years, will do so again this year. But the ice isn’t thick enough to support plowing equipment yet. Leary said that the precursor to the ice road, the truck trail, goes from Bethel downriver to Oscarville, Napakiak, and Napaskiak.

“And I think a handful of guys have travelled from the tundra villages by truck, just a few,” Leary said, “No truck trail above Bethel. There’s significantly more snow, and ice is significantly thinner under that snow.”

He added that there are risks involved in traveling on a truck trail that’s mostly unmarked.

“People are getting confused once in a while and driving over ice that hasn’t been checked. You know, even despite the cold weather, there is thin ice out there if you go where the snow hasn’t been disturbed,” Leary said.

Still, Leary is encouraged about how the river is freezing this year.

“I mean, we’re way ahead of where we’ve been in recent years. It froze, you know, more like we used to consider normal: late October. The downside was it snowed too early, and that has slowed it down. You know, if we had no snow right now, after all this cold weather you could drive anything on the river,” Leary said.