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Foam clung to the charred remains of castle steeples and playhouses while firefighters swept the Twin Lakes playground with high-pressure hoses.

(Read more: Two teenagers charged in fire at Twin Lakes playground)

The smoke was thick but through the gaps, it didn’t look like much was left of the popular playground located in a park north of downtown Juneau.

The playground caught fire Monday evening. Bystanders watching from the sidelines said it was a huge loss.

Eleven-year-old Kala Burras was watching the fire crews with her parents and brother. She said she feels a strong connection to this park.

“It was really important because I liked to play on it everyday and it was just really fun to play on it and now that it’s gone, it’s really sad,” Burras said.

Kala said she especially used the park in the summer months, something she was looking forward to doing this year.

“I’m probably just going to go see if there’s any other thing I can do, like play at another park, but it’s probably not going to be as good as this one,” she said

Kala’s 10-year-old brother, Kaleb said he loves the park, too, and he and his friends usually play here during the summer.

“I’m probably going to stay home and play video games now,” he said.

But, he said video games won’t make up for it completely.

Nerio Bernaldo said that his kids hadn’t even seen the fire damage in person yet. He showed them a picture on Facebook before coming out to the scene.

“When I got wind of it, I told them about it and immediately they started crying, so I could see the effect that it had on them and that was just by word of mouth,” Bernaldo said. “So, I think by a lot of kids actually seeing it would cause a lot of emotional trauma and they’d be upset about what’s going on.”

Bernaldo was sad and angry. He wants to know how the fire started. He said this playground was a go-to destination for a lot of families, including his. He said it was like a safe haven for his kids in a community where he is increasingly worried about his kids having a safe place to go.

A Facebook group called Rebuild Castle Park popped up Monday and within three hours of the fire, there were nearly 1,800 members.

Capital City Fire/Rescue is looking for information about the fire from the public. Contact the Juneau Police Department at 586-0600 with information. 

Update | 10:03 a.m. Tuesday

Two 13-year-old boys were charged in a fire at Twin Lakes, which is being investigated as arson.

The boys were located, interviewed and lodged at the Johnson Youth Center, according to a Juneau Police Department news release.

Update | 10:07 p.m.

The Juneau Police Department says Glacier Highway has reopened by Twin Lakes.

Glacier Hwy by Twin Lakes is being reopened now.

— Juneau Police Dept. (@JuneauPD) April 25, 2017

Capital City Fire/Rescue plans to put out additional information in the morning.

Update | 8:08 p.m.

A Facebook group called “Rebuild Castle Park – Juneau, AK” popped up about an hour ago and already has more than 1,200 members.

People there are sharing fond memories of the park, old photos and ideas to rebuild.

Erica Barker posted that her “almost 7 year old son is crying asking why someone would do this to his park. he says someone stole is ‘rememories’ and he wants to be involved in the rebuilding.”

Update | 7:40 p.m.

At the scene earlier, Assistant Fire Chief Tod Chambers said the cause was unknown and that the playground appeared to be a total loss.

He said it was especially bad because so much of the playground was made of plastic.

Chambers said the department is seeking information from the public to help establish what happened. Contact the Juneau Police Department at 586-0600 to report information.

As of about 7:20 p.m., the nursing supervisor on shift at Bartlett Regional Hospital says the hospital had not received any patients related to the fire.

Update | 7:08 p.m.

KTOO’s Kelli Burkinshaw is at the scene, where she says  the fire has mostly died down. She says the fire appeared mostly contained to the playground area, and that the castle structure is completely gone.

However, she says there is still “a lot of really smelly smoke” with a chemical smell affecting her throat and burning her eyes. Burkinshaw lives downwind of the fire and said she had to leave her home for relief.

Update | 6:51 p.m.

Through city social media, Fire Chief Rich Etheridge reports the fire is 95 percent under control.

Twin Lakes playground fire is 95 percent under control, fire chief says.

— CBJ (@cbjuneau) April 25, 2017

Juneau Police dispatch reports Glacier Highway is closed from Hospital Drive to Wire Street, and requests motorists on Egan Drive keep traffic flowing.

The million dollar Project Playground at Twin Lakes was completed in 2007, built mostly from community fundraising and volunteer labor, according to the park’s website.

Original post | 6:36 p.m.

A fire is ablaze at the Twin Lakes playground, pouring out dense black smoke.

On social media, the City and Borough of Juneau has Capital City Fire/Rescue Chief Rich Etheridge saying no citizen injuries have been reported. Firefighters are working the scene.

From @CCFR captain Rich Etheridge: No citizen injuries reported. Firefighters still working. pic.twitter.com/PWxGHVWLdU

— CBJ (@cbjuneau) April 25, 2017

This is a developing story, check back for more. 

Inside the Juneau-Douglas High School commons, several face painted kids and a couple of adults are engrossed watching electrical engineer Bill Leighty explain the mysteries behind his model energy systems.

Right now, he’s showing off the steam engine.

“OK, flick that big wheel with your fingers,” Leighty directed a boy. “More, flick it harder, harder. Flick it the other direction. Ooh, almost had it go again.”

It takes the boy a few more tries.

“Ooh, try it again,” Leighty encouraged. “There it goes! It’s running!”

This Earth Day, Juneau residents wrapped up their first March for Science with a stop at a fair promoting renewable energy and environmental consciousness.

About 30 different organizations and individuals put the fair together, including environmentalists and wildlife advocates.

Bill Leighty is a director of the Leighty foundation, a local charitable organization.

He has been on a mission for 15 years exploring how to make the jump from fossil fuel to renewable energy without carbon dioxide emissions.

“That’s what I’m demonstrating with the little hydrogen demonstrator here,” he said. “That’s an electrochemical energy system.”

Next, he compared the electrochemical system with the heat engine.

“Heat engines like we have in our cars now and boilers are very inefficient compared to electrochemistry, so that’s why we have the hydrogen system, which is not hot at all,” Leighty said. “There’s no heat in there, except a little byproduct heat. Whenever you convert from one energy form to another, you lose a little energy in inefficiency and it appears as heat.”

Leighty said he wants the kids to think about complete energy systems and how they work, from the source all the way to “turning the wheels on their cars.”

A few booths down from Leighty, The Juneau chapter of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, is handing out flyers against predator control and supporting a buffer zone near Denali National Park and Preserve where wolves would be safe from trapping and hunting.

The Southeast Alaska Conservation Council is promoting their desire for a new baseline study on Hawk Inlet, an Admiralty Island watershed.

SEACC representatives say they want to know whether mining operations in the area are polluting the water and in turn hurting marine life and the people who eat it.

Other organizations at the Renewable Juneau fair include the Alaska Clean Harbors Project, the U.S. Forest Service, Juneau Compost and Juneau District Heating.

Thirty-one groups are sitting behind tables at the fair, according to Danielle Redmond, coordinator for Renewable Juneau.

“They represent all different kinds of things from local food to climate organizing to local schools and school groups, as well as advocacy organizations so it’s been a really good mix,” Redmond said.

Renewable Juneau is a nonprofit that, like their name suggests, promotes renewable energy and utility regulation in Alaska.

Redmond is sitting cross-legged and holding her baby boy.

She said this is the organization’s first fair and they’re holding it on the same day as Juneau’s March for Science.

“Oftentimes we have these marches, and we build up all this great energy, and we get excited, and we whoop and holler, and it’s important to show that energy and to show that publicly,” she said. “But, it’s just as important to keep that energy going and channel it into productive avenues of both policy and concrete solutions on the day to day level.”

Redmond has no idea how many people cycled through the fair, but she estimates they saw at least a couple of hundred, with a big boost in attendance coming from the protesters who finished their March for Science right outside the fair’s door.

Editor’s Note: Bill Leighty sits on the board of the Leighty Foundation which has helped pay for KTOO’s internship program.

Correction: An earlier version of a photo caption in this story misspelled Renewable Juneau volunteer David Abad’s name. 

Some Juneau middle school athletes are hoping that a recent change in policy will let them compete outside of Juneau.

The Juneau School District hasn’t allowed middle school athletes to leave Juneau for school-sponsored sports events over the last three years.

The school board changed that policy earlier this month, so now the district’s staff will decide whether its two middle schools can send athletes out of town.

But how do students feel about this decision? Three Floyd Dryden Middle School athletes told me they really want to travel.

“Yeah, I’ve always wanted to be involved in the Ketchikan tournament,” said seventh-grader Cael Brown.

Brown, who is going out for wrestling next year, said he’s been to that tournament in Ketchikan with his dad and it was a big deal.

“It’s such a big sport. It’s one of the biggest sports in Alaska, like basketball, football, wrestling,” Brown said. “Those are like the biggest sports in Alaska and that feeling of how everybody is, like, connected with the sport, that’s really cool.”

Brown said knowing he wouldn’t be able to travel for sports actually discouraged him from trying out in the past.

Blake Plummer is also in seventh grade and said she’s been playing soccer since she was about 4-years-old.

For her, it’s about the competitive edge. She thinks the prohibition on travel has weakened her game.

“When we play against the same teams over and over, we never learn anything,” Plummer said. “We never get new competition, and when we do travel, we see how other teams play and we feel more comfortable learning how they play and going against them.”

When Plummer heard about the decision to stop sports travel, she felt like she would miss out when she reached middle school and she wouldn’t be able to reach her full potential.

In Lemon Creek, a 10-minute drive southeast of Floyd Dryden, Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School’s track and field team is fighting through a timed mile.

Eighth-grader Sage Yeshua finished with a time of 6 minutes, 49 seconds. After catching his breath, he said he likes playing soccer, running cross country and cross-country skiing with the Juneau Ski Team.

Yeshua goes to the Juneau Community Charter School, so he doesn’t know how much traveling he would’ve done for sports even if there wasn’t a ban.

“I think, it would be interesting to do that. Like, to go up against people that I don’t normally see, but it’s been also, like, pretty good just racing with the people here. It’s pretty fun still,” Yeshua said.

He was kind of neutral. He was also the only student out of five who wasn’t against the ban. The consensus for the other four is it was bad.

District officials believe one reason the school board blocked travel was because some kids couldn’t afford to participate.

Seventh-grader Andrew Smith runs track and cross country. He and several other kids think that instead of banning travel three years ago, the board should’ve found a way to help everyone who wanted to travel.

“I think some kids really do want to travel and they should allow it, but since not everyone can afford it, they should make it so there’s some way … not exactly like a scholarship, but they should make it some way that they can,” Smith said.

But, Smith said there should be some conditions.

“You should have to do some kind of tryout or tournament to go in, so the school district could support everybody going, but they wouldn’t have to spend money for everybody to go,” he said.

Whether anyone will get to go is still uncertain.

The district’s administration will have the final say on rules that could allow travel, or continue an effective ban.

An online fraud scheme has bilked the Juneau Soccer Club out of more than $13,700.

It began in February when a series of innocuous looking emails appeared.

“It’s a form of email scam called ‘spoofing’ where they make it appear that the email is coming from someone in your organization,” said Ellie Davis, a board member of the club, on Monday. The nonprofit has nearly 400 players — some as young as 4 — signed up and organizes teams and tournaments.

“The emails appeared to be from our board president to our board treasurer and the emails requested that payments be made on an invoice for some soccer equipment.”

The so-called invoices requested three separate payments: $2,800, $5,500 and $5,384.

The board treasurer paid what appeared to be legitimate expenses.

But when the club president denied ever making the requests, it was clear something was wrong.

That’s when the club took a closer look.

“Hindsight is 20/20,” Davis said. “When you looked back at some of the detailed information in the emails that you couldn’t get unless you were looking at it in an expanded view, the time zones suggested that they were not in Alaska or maybe not in the United States.”

Fortunately the club has enough savings to take the hit and doesn’t plan to cancel any programs.

Juneau Police Lt. David Campbell said the department is investigating the source of the emails.

“In the time I’ve been on the Juneau Police Department, I’ve seen lots of fraud cases come through,” Campbell said Monday. “I haven’t seen necessarily a spoofing one come through like this one has. But I think one of the best defenses that an organization can have is just really strong internal accounting principles.”

The Juneau Soccer Club has a 2014 policy requiring two signatures for payments in excess of $5,000.

Campbell said that’s a good policy. Though it wasn’t followed in this case.

“Having procedures in place that require funds to be distributed by more than just one person’s authorization would go a long way,” he said. “Having multiple eyes look at something before a transfer happens is always a good idea.”

The soccer club’s treasurer has since resigned.

A downtown fire on Saturday night shut down part of Seward Street and smoked out a building that houses multiple stores. Water and foam ran down the street and pooled at the feet of onlookers who watched firefighters search for the fire’s source.

Assistant Fire Chief Ed Quinto said firefighters were able to respond quickly and clear the building, and there were no injuries. He said construction underway in the building could have facilitated the fire’s spread, but firefighters quickly contained it.

Capital City Fire/Rescue Chief Rich Etheridge said the fire started in Art Sutch Photography and Digital Imaging.

“The building is balloon framed construction and the fire is in the walls at this point so they’re trying to determine if the fire started up high and fell down and kept burning up or if it actually started down on the ground floor,” Etheridge said.

Etheridge estimated about 30 firefighters responded. He said fire marshals would investigate the cause after the heart of the fire was found and extinguished. The chief believes the damage was limited to the building housing the photoshop.

Suzzane Hudson’s antique shop Nana’s Attic is several storefronts down from the photoshop. Hudson rushed to the scene when she heard about the fire.

“I went in to see what has been done. I have no electricity and smoke damage,” Hudson said.

She said she has insurance and is waiting to hear how bad the damage is.

“I’m going to stick it out. I stuck out a robbery, I can stick this out,” she said.

The emergency vehicles cleared out a little after 9 p.m., but Art Sutch was in for a long night. The smell of smoke hung in the air.

From under scaffolding on the sidewalk, a neighbor handed Sutch some plastic bins.

Wearing a headlamp in his dark store, Sutch said, “There’s not much to say other than this sucks.”