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Village Public Safety Officer Zach West is the Tlingit-Haida Central Council VPSO of the Year. West serves Kasaan, a village of around 50, on Prince of Wales Island.

During a ceremony in Juneau Monday, Central Council’s VPSO coordinator Jason Wilson said it was hard to choose out of the seven dedicated officers serving Southeast Alaska villages — Elfin Cove, Hydaburg, Kake, Pelican, Saxman and Thorne Bay.

He said West stood out on two occasions. One involved juveniles drinking.

“When they got there, all were passed out, and one was passed out in the back of a vehicle in his own vomit unresponsive. But because of Mr. West’s quick actions clearing the airway and getting him breathing and getting him to EMS, this person has an opportunity to live another day,” said Wilson.

He said during another time West was asked to direct traffic in Hydaburg for a totem pole raising ceremony. Instead, West helped carry the totem pole.

“On the surface that might seem like a pretty simple thing, but in reality it’s not. That’s a person being a part of a community. That’s a person that’s getting involved. And that’s what we ask our VPSOs to do and that’s a big deal,” Wilson said.

West has been a VPSO in Kasaan for two and a half years. He calls it a balancing act.

“It’s a great mix of public services and it’s not just one thing. You get to wear different hats. You get to do law enforcement and serve that way. And then the next day you can go do fire training,” West says.

He says law enforcement is only 20 percent of his VPSO duties. West is also Kasaan’s EMS manager and fire chief.

Around Southeast, VPSOs take on a myriad of duties including animal control, oil spill response, suicide prevention, water safety, mental health counseling and drug prevention.

Update | 3:30 p.m.

Alaska Electric Light & Power reports all customers were back on hydroelectric generation by early afternoon. The cause of the transmission line failure remains a mystery.

Update | 12:00 p.m.

Alaska Electric Light & Power Spokesman Alec Mesdag says this morning’s area-wide power outage was caused by a fault along the utility’s Snettisham transmission line.

Crews initially thought the outage was caused by a turbine failure at the Snettisham hydroelectric facility. Later they determined it was an issue with the line that feeds most of Juneau’s power.

Mesdag says the transmission line is working fine. The cause of the fault has not been determined.

“This happens in town a lot on distribution, where maybe a branch will fall off a tree, it’ll hit the lines, create a fault and then fall to the ground. And there will be no lasting impact to our system, but it will cause an outage,” Mesdag says. “So, something of that nature may have happened out there, but at this point I don’t believe there has been a specific cause identified.”

The outage started about 8:40 a.m. Mesdag says AEL&P fired up its diesel generators and had power restored to most of the borough by 10:30. He says crews should have the system switched back to hydro power by this afternoon.

Original post:

Alaska Electric Light & Power reports an area-wide power outage Friday morning was caused by a problem with a turbine at the Snettisham Hydroelectric Facility.

AEL&P Spokeswoman Deb Driscoll says the utility turned on its diesel generators to restore power to customers in Juneau. Once power is restored to all parts of the borough, Driscoll says AEL&P will work to restore hydroelectric power.

The outage began about 8:39 a.m. Power was restored to the downtown area about 9:06 a.m.

This is a developing story. Check back for details.

Russian Orthodox funeral services for former Alaska poet laureate Richard Dauenhauer are taking place 10 a.m. on Thursday, August 28 at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in the Mendenhall Valley.

Dauenhauer, who died on Tuesday, was known for many things, including poetry, translation and teaching. He was also the husband of Tlingit scholar and Alaska writer laureate Nora Marks Dauenhauer. For more than 40 years, they had a partnership of marriage and scholarship.

Dick Dauenhauer was teaching folklore at Alaska Methodist University in the early 1970s when he met student Nora Marks.

Her friend Rosita Worl, now president of Sealaska Heritage Institute, was also a student.

“Her and Dick just hit it off. I think they had the same kind of sense of humor as I recall. And that was when their work started,” Worl says.

Dauenhauer and Marks married on November 28, 1973. She was 15 years older.

“They became quite a team. He had the technical knowledge of languages and stories and he was an educator, and she had all the traditional knowledge of Tlingit and it was a great combination,” Worl says.

Born in Syracuse, New York in 1942, Dick Dauenhauer had been a linguist for most of his life. He earned degrees in Slavic Languages and German. He translated poetry from Russian, Classical Greek, Swedish and Finnish. In 1969, he moved to Alaska to teach at Alaska Methodist University, now known as Alaska Pacific University.

Dauenhauer and Marks spent a few years at the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. In 1983, they moved to Juneau. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, they worked at Sealaska Heritage Foundation in Juneau, now known as Sealaska Heritage Institute.

They co-authored Tlingit language books and developed teaching materials. With the publication of Beginning Tlingit, Worl credits the couple for popularizing the language’s written form.

“What he and Nora did was bring the orthography to everyday use. They made that available to the students of the language,” Worl says.

They collected hundreds of recordings documenting Tlingit history, culture and language. They co-edited the four-volume series, “Classics of Tlingit Oral Literature“, and received American Book Awards for two volumes.

Juneau playwright and screenwriter Dave Hunsaker based his play “Battles of Fire and Water” on the tri-lingual volume, “The Battles of Sitka, 1802 and 1804.”

“But really the book of ‘Tlingit Oratory’ was, to me, stunning. And by that time I had been adopted by the Tlingit. I had lived here in Juneau for 30 years and I felt like I knew a lot about the culture and when that book came out, I realized I didn’t know anything about the culture,” Hunsaker says.

Hunsaker says through translated speeches of Tlingit elders, the Dauenhauers revealed the complex and poetic oral tradition of the Tlingit culture.

“They recognized that these are not charming campfire Indian lore stories; these were world literature. And they treated them as world literature. And the way they rendered them and the way that they’ve been published so we can all now read them forever, they, by God, are world literature,” Hunsaker says.

Between their joint books and separate volumes of creative writing, Dick and Nora Dauenhauer have produced an abundant body of work. But their partnership held much more.

“It’s one of the great love affairs of any life that I know anything about. They never got past the hand holding stage,” Hunsaker says.

Hunsaker has been friends with the Dauenhauers for about 40 years. Throughout that time, he says they always acted like newlyweds.

“In spite of age difference, in spite of their incredibly different backgrounds, I just saw them be always fascinated with each other,” Hunsaker says.

In 2005, Dick Dauenhauer was appointed President’s Professor of Alaska Native Languages and Culture at the University of Alaska Southeast. Chancellor John Pugh says the couple spearheaded the creation of the program.

“They just were really the heart and soul of the Alaska Native Language program,” Pugh says.

Pugh says up to that time, other UA faculty members had studied the language, but the Dauenhauers wanted to make sure it was spoken.

“That was the real change in terms of not being an academic language but trying to actually think about how we might have the speakers that we presently have and have them really be able to transfer the language to younger people who would carry the language forward and it could be a living language, continue as a living language,” Pugh says,

Assistant Professor Lance Twitchell now heads the Alaska Native Languages degree program at UAS. He says it’s been an honor to know and work with Dick and Nora, “and see how they operate just as poets and artists and linguists and anthropologists and just wonderful human beings. And I had the chance to tell both, ‘If I’m one-tenth of what you are, I’m pretty happy with the way my life went.'”

When Dick Dauenhauer passed away August 19 at the age of 72, he and Nora were nearing the end of a multi-decade project – a collection of Tlingit Raven stories.

Related story:
Richard Dauenhauer dies at 72

If you’ve spent any time on social media this summer, you’ve probably come across Youtube videos of the Ice Bucket Challenge. It’s a fundraising effort for ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Now the viral sensation is popping up in communities around Alaska like Petersburg, where the term “ice bucket” is taken literally.

Everyone from Justin Bieber to Alaska Governor Sean Parnell has been doused with water.

“I think the funniest one I saw was Martha Stewart. She went and did the ice bucket challenge before she got her hair done. I thought that was cheating a little,” says Nancy Berg. She co-owns the Viking Travel agency with her husband and, together with their employees, they will each dump a five gallon bucket of water on themselves–with some local flair, of course. “So it will be ice with some ice from the cannery. We’re not even just doing water.”

They’re doing it to raise money for ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease which a neurodegenerative illness. Here’s how it works: people challenge each other to dump a bucket of ice water on themselves.

“Supposedly if you don’t do the challenge, you’re supposed to donate, but I think everyone’s donating and doing it for fun.”

Most people are donating around $100 for the cause. The ALS Association has raised almost $23 million dollars this year, much of that attributed to the viral campaign. It’s significantly more than last year’s earnings of just over $1 million. Berg says she learned about the Ice Bucket Challenge while watching the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon.

“They got challenged by Justin Timberlake and I kept following who was doing it. Now every time I get on Facebook or somewhere on the internet I see some new celebrity.”

Viking Travel is challenging friends and local business in downtown Petersburg, but first they have to douse themselves. They line up on the sidewalk outside their office, buckets filled to the brim. They count down “3,2,1″ before dumping the slushy mixture of ice and water onto themselves.

Some critics of the Ice Bucket Challenge are calling it an of act of “slacktivism.” A viral sensation run amok without any long term commitment from its participants, but for the Petersburg Insurance Center, ALS affects someone the company knows. That’s why employee Katie Eddy says they’re accepting the challenge.

“We have a fellow agent in Juneau and his brother passed away from the disease, so that’s why we’re doing it. Kind of in honor of his brother.”

Nancy Berg crosses the street to challenge Inga’s Gallery, a popular food truck in downtown. She approaches the window, telling the staff “you have 24 hours,” and they genially accept. The challenge has spread to other people and businesses in the community–ice buckets poised to drop.

It’s back to school Wednesday for 4,837 Juneau children. That’s about 50 more students than the Juneau School District expected.

Already, new superintendent Mark Miller plans to add a new teacher at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School and a half-time position at Gastineau Elementary.

“It’s always good to have a few more students than you projected because we can bring on an extra teacher if we need to, but if you guess low, you’re going to kill your budget because you don’t get enough money for the students you’re staffed for,” Miller says.

Most school district funding comes from the state of Alaska and is based on the number of students enrolled in mid-October.

Enrollment was down last school year, resulting in less funding and major budget cuts.

Economist Gregg Erickson forecasts enrollment for Juneau schools. He says the city lost a number of state and federal government jobs early last year, resulting in fewer students.

“Typically you lose a student for every four jobs or so,” he says.

Erickson says current employment data shows Juneau is still in a small recession. He says that could affect enrollment through 2015, when it would start slowly growing again.

“In June of last year it appears we lost about 317 jobs over the previous year. The data I have now goes six months forward and it seems to suggest that those job losses have actually accelerated a little bit and that we’ve now lost more than 400 jobs,” he says.

When students take their seats Wednesday morning, they will be counted. The October numbers go to the state education department and are used for calculating the amount districts will get for school operations.  But the budget is written in March and the district doesn’t know the amount of state funding until the legislature adjourns in mid April.

Out of Juneau schools’ 661 staff members this year, 355 are teachers. That’s 18 fewer teachers than last year, but no one was laid off. The reductions were made through attrition, according to Kristin Bartlett, district chief of staff.

After 53 years of continuous service, the turbines at Sitka’s Blue Lake Hydro plant are quiet.

Walt Dangel, one of the original powerhouse operators at Blue Lake, threw the switches turning off the plant in a small decommissioning ceremony Monday morning. Dangel was assisted by Frank Rogers, Sitka’s senior plant operator.

The two old turbines produce a combined 6 megawatts of power. They’re being replaced by three new turbines that will produce 16 megawatts.

For about the next two months, Sitka will get its electricity from the Green Lake hydro plant and the backup diesel turbines on Jarvis Street. All drinking water in the community is now drawn from a $4-million temporary filtration plant on the Indian River. The shutdown is to allow workers to complete the new penstock at the Blue Lake dam, connecting the expanded dam to its new powerhouse.

For the next 63 days, the city has asked residents to conserve both water and electricity. The traffic signal symbol used by the electric department to indicate the availability of power went from green to red overnight. As the weather cools down, residents are being asked to use alternative heat sources, such as oil or wood, if possible.

The city also warned Sitkans that they may see yellow or discolored water coming out of the tap, especially after a heavy rainfall. The color comes from higher-than-usual amounts of organic material being washed into Indian River, but the water is safe to drink. Trying to flush the lines won’t clear the water. In fact, excess water consumption only strains the capability of the temporary plant at the river.

So what happens in 63 days? Sitka utility director Chris Brewton says there should be enough water in Blue Lake to commission the first of the three new turbines. Then, over the next two weeks to a month, they’ll bring the two others online.

Brewton says it’s going to be bumpy for a while, as engineer work out the bugs in the new powerhouse. But not as bumpy as the commissioning of the 18 megawatt plant at Green Lake in 1982. Power outages were so frequent at the time that the Alaska Pulp Corporation Mill generated its own electricity for several months.

The issue is the size of Sitka’s electric grid. As the new turbines are powered up, small problems can force the shutdown of the whole system.

And a final, small upgrade that’s been overshadowed by all the major work at Blue Lake: the electric department has replaced the 670 kilowatt turbine at the Sawmill Creek campground with a bigger, 1 megawatt unit.
Brewton says the old turbine — just like the Blue Lake units — is still in good shape. He says, “We’ll shrink wrap it and try to sell it on eBay.”