Tourism

A replica of Noah’s Ark has been built in the rolling hills of northern Kentucky and it is, quite literally, of biblical proportions. The wood structure stands seven stories high and is the length of 1 1/2 football fields.

“The Bible indicates the original Ark was 300 cubits, using the Hebrew royal cubit that calculates in modern-day terms to 510 feet long,” says Mark Looey, a co-founder of Answers in Genesis, the Christian ministry that built the attraction. It’s the same group that opened the Creation Museum in 2007 in Petersburg, Ky., which promotes a literal interpretation of the Bible and other teachings: that planet Earth is only 6,000 years old and that man lived alongside dinosaurs.

The ark attraction has been mired in controversy for years, and though Answers in Genesis promises jobs and increased tourism to a region in desperate need of an economic boost, for many who live there, it’s very much a mixed blessing.

‘After The Flash And Bang’

The ark offers three decks of exhibits so sophisticated, you might think you stepped into Disney World.

There are no live animals on the ark, though. “There’s a zoo out back for them,” Looey says. Instead, the ark will be filled with lifelike models of animals — including dinosaurs and a pair of unicorns — designed by many of the people who also made exhibits for the Creation Museum.

The ark doesn’t float either. Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis and Ark Encounter president and CEO, says it wasn’t built to float. “We built it as a reminder, a reminder in regard to God’s word and the account of Noah and the flood,” he says.

It cost $100 million to build and is expected to draw up to 2 million visitors a year along with millions in tourism revenue, according to what the ministry calls an independent study. Looey says they’ve already hired over 300 staff and hundreds more jobs are on the way when the other phases — including a walled city and a replica of the Tower of Babel — are completed.

Many in Williamstown, Ky., the small town that sits right across Interstate 75 from the attraction, are waiting for it to open with bated breath. The town — the rural seat of Grant County, Ky., — has a population of about 4,000. It’s a middle-class bedroom community right between Cincinnati and Lexington, Kentucky.

Williamstown Mayor Rick Skinner, an enthusiastic supporter of the attraction, says the town has already upgraded its electricity and built a new water treatment plant. Downtown is also getting a face-lift. On Main Street, many new stores have already opened up while others are in the process of being renovated. Before news of the Ark Encounter coming to town, the old brick buildings that lined Main Street were mostly vacant.

Local lawyer Bill Adkins says when the recession hit Williamstown, it hit hard. He remembers sitting in foreclosure settlements almost every week.

According to the study cited by Answers in Genesis, the ark’s economic impact will be about $4 billion over the next decade. But Adkins is skeptical.

“We’ve not seen the hotels, we’ve not seen the restaurants coming in to support this attraction,” he says. “I think a lot of people are waiting to invest because they want to see if after the flash and bang of the opening, what happens next.”

Answers in Genesis points to the success of the Creation Museum as proof of the ark’s potential. The ministry says the museum gets 300,000 visitors a year and that its generated revenue has exceeded expectations, though they would not provide numbers.

Then there are controversies around the project, provoking debate over separation of church and state. The state withdrew tax incentives it had awarded Answers in Genesis, in part, because the ministry refused to pledge that it would not discriminate on the basis of religion in its hiring. The state said the project had evolved from a tourism attraction to an extension of the ministry.

The tax breaks were later reinstated after Answers in Genesis, which said it had the right to hire on the basis of religion, sued in federal court and won.

Adkins is uncomfortable with the tax breaks worth up to $18 million the ministry is getting from the state. Answers in Genesis is considered a tax-exempt church and critics of the ark project have said that getting tax breaks amounts to “double dipping.”

It also just doesn’t sit well with him that job applicants must adhere to the ministry’s rigid moral code and belief system.

“That one would have to subjugate their own beliefs to comply with that of an employer,” he says, “that seems very intrusive and very oppressive to me.

A federal judge earlier this year ruled that Answers in Genesis, as a religious group, has a right to restrict its hiring.

Resident Jay Novarra is irked at local leaders. Along with providing the project with free land, Williamstown also gave Answers in Genesis $62 million in bonds. The ministry says the town will not be on the hook for those.

As a farmer, Novarra is worried about the price of water going up since the town is also providing water to the ark.

“We do have a lot of people who make a living farming and you start adding to the price we have to pay to raise our food, then you’re definitely impacting farmers,” she says. “And I have to ask myself: What is that farmer getting out of it?”

Mayor Skinner says there is no contingency plan. They’re putting all their eggs in one basket — kind of like Noah.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The captain of a small cruise ship touring Southeast Alaska was discovered dead in his cabin Monday morning.

Ken Adams was the captain of the Admiralty Dream, a 153-foot vessel operated by Alaskan Dream Cruises based in Sitka.

Alaskan Dream Vice President Jamie Cagle said Adams was found unresponsive by fellow crew members, who administered CPR.

Alaska State Troopers responded and boarded the Admiralty Dream in Angoon on Admiralty Island.

Cagle said troopers found nothing suspicious about the death.

Adams was from California. He worked for Alaskan Dream Cruises for four years. He was 47 years old.

Cagle said of Adams that “his passion for his career was evident, and he’ll be greatly missed.”

A grief counselor visited crew members aboard the Admiralty Dream later in the day on Monday. The ship has a capacity of 58 passengers. Cagle declined to comment on the status of the cruise in the aftermath of the captain’s death. Alaskan Dream operates four other small cruise vessels in Southeast Alaska.

Adams’ body was transported to the state medical examiner’s office in Anchorage for autopsy.

For Karen Abel, what started as learning more about her grandfather has grown into sharing the story of World War II’s Aleutian Island campaign. And it’s brought her over 6,000 miles from her home in Florida to see firsthand where he served 74 years ago.

Growing up in Winnipeg, Abel never heard about her grandfather’s service in the Royal Canadian Air Force. She didn’t know about the year — from June of 1942 to June of 1943 — Robert W. Lynch was stationed in the Aleutians as a member of the 111F Squadron.

After the war, his medals were in their living room and his uniform hung in the closet, but it’s just something the family never talked about. When he died, in 1996, she discovered his flight logs and photographs and became inspired to create a blog.

“Once I started to tell his story to other people and talk about the war in Alaska, most people had never heard about what happened here,” Abel said. “And that broke my heart that so many people were up here fighting and so many lives were effected and nobody knew their story.”

The blog grew and she began sharing the stories of other veterans of the Aleutian campaign. As a single mom with her own business, Abel cannot write every day. But, the project has blossomed into a part time job.

“Any spare chance I get I will probably be writing,” Abel said. “I have said that if I could get paid for this I would do this full time. That’s how much I love it.”

For her second trip to Alaska, Karen choose a two-week WWII historical tour through Valor Tours. It brought her from Adak, to Attu and back to Unalaska with stops in Kiska, Umnak and Chernofski.

“It’s like a living museum to go there and to see how things were,” Abel said. “And to see the guns. You get to touch them and feel them and see where they were placed in action. It’s not in a museum. It’s not behind glass. It was exactly as it was then.”

She was the first family member of a veteran to go on the trip.

“A lot of people will know about battles, they knew a lot about guns, strategy maybe,” Abel said. “I’m more interested in the effect war had on people. How people lived. Who was fighting. Who were the ones going in this brutally harsh desolate island and living and fighting.”

And the trip inspires her to keep writing.

“You know that you think this big journey might be the ending. You know, ‘Oh, I reached my goal. Oh, I made it to the Aleutian Islands.’ But for me it doesn’t feel like an ending. It feels like a beginning.”

Abel thinks her grandfather would be proud of her work.

“And he deserves to feel like that,” Abel said. “And they all deserve it. That’s why I write. They all deserve to feel proud and they all deserve to be heard.”

Her next big project is working alongside the Smithsonian Museum — in Washington D.C. — to develop an exhibit that shares the history of the Aleutian campaign. The museum is off to a good start, they already display a plane her grandfather flew.

On Aug. 16, the Crystal Serenity will steam out of Seward on a historic trip. The vessel will be the first big luxury liner to chart a course through the Northwest Passage, stopping in Kodiak, Unalaska and Nome before cruising through Canada’s far north to Greenland and then south to New York. The unprecedented voyage is generating excitement — and trepidation.

Cruise ships have been plying Arctic waters for years, but the Crystal Serenity will be the largest by far to chart a course through the Northwest Passage. The luxury ship will carry more than 1,000 travelers and 620 crew members on a journey that will take an estimated 32 days, and comes at a cost of $21,000 per passenger.

It marks a turning point for tourism in the Arctic, which has seen a steady increase in ship traffic as a warming planet yields more and more ice-free water in summer.

For some, it’s an exciting shift. In Nome, Harbormaster Lucas Stotts said there’s a lot of enthusiasm for the arrival of the ship, which will actually have to moor offshore, as it’s too big for the harbor.

“For us, 800 to 1,000 passengers is an awful lot of folks coming ashore when we’re used to seeing the pocket-sized cruise ships or the expeditionary cruises that have anywhere between 100 and 200 people on board only,” Stotts said.

Others are looking on the unprecedented trip with some caution.

David Aplin with the World Wildlife Fund’s Arctic Field Program said the region has opened up to traffic so rapidly that he’s concerned our reach there is outstripping our understanding of the place.

“As the ice recedes and we create a new ocean at the top of the world, what we’re finding worldwide is that we’re unprepared for that increase in shipping traffic,” he said.

Aplin and others say safety is the biggest concern when it comes to Arctic travel. Insurance company Allianz Global keeps tabs on international shipping, and its latest report shows that Arctic travel is relatively risky. Losses at sea dropped overall last year, but because of new traffic, the number of incidents in the Arctic jumped to 71 —  a nearly 30 percent increase. It’s a decade high.

And mounting a mass rescue operation thousands of miles from the nearest deepwater port is difficult. Same goes for containing oil spills. The Coast Guard has been planning for a potential mass casualty event in the Arctic for years and is planning a drill near Nome, though it won’t happen until after the Crystal Serenity departs.

There are other concerns about impacts to a fragile and stressed Arctic environment, and to the Native communities who rely on it.

Andrew Hartsig is the director of the Ocean Conservancy’s Arctic Program. He said cargo ships are usually looking for the shortest, easiest routes, but that’s not necessarily the case for cruise ships.

“A tourism company is often seeking out the very places that are kind of most dramatic or seeking out congregations of animals, because that’s what the passengers want to see,” Hartsig said.

John Stoll, the Crystal vice president in charge of managing the Northwest Passage voyage, said the company has been carefully planning this trip for three years. The ship has been outfitted with new ice-detecting equipment, including forward-looking sonar and thermal imaging technology. And once it’s in Canadian waters, an icebreaker on loan from Great Britain will act as a support ship, sending up helicopters for real-time ice recon. The RRS Ernest Shackleton will also carry emergency rations and a team of experts guides who will run special Zodiac expeditions for guests.

“We want to be the cruise line that sets the example for how to do this and how to do it right,” Stoll said.

He said Crystal has also planned carefully to minimize impacts. They’ll be exceeding international guidelines on wastewater discharge, he said, and they’ve been working with the tiny Arctic towns they’ll visit to make sure they won’t overwhelm the communities.

“I think Crystal from this standpoint has an obligation to do what we can to introduce the world to this part of the world,” Stoll said. “It’s phenomenal and it’s something that people shouldn’t miss.”

Still, some are concerned about what Crystal’s trip heralds. Austin Ahmasuk is with the Kawerak Corporation’s Marine Program, which aims to give a voice to Native villages as the world continues to talk about increasing Arctic traffic. He said there’s reason to worry about tourism’s impacts on subsistence resources.

“People in northwestern Alaska, on the coast, we’ve been mariners for a very long time and we make substantial use of the marine environment for subsistence food items, for culture, for living,” Ahmasuk said. “And it is very important to us..”

Despite that, Ahmasuk said, it’s easy for Native communities to be left out of the conversation about the opening of the Arctic.

“We want to make sure that the environment is not damaged, we want to make sure that our communities are able to sustain themselves, and we want to be able to participate in some decision making,” Ahmasuk said.

When it comes to this trip, Hartsig and others said Crystal Cruises has done a solid job of planning. They said they worry about other operators who’ll come along later.

It’s a mixed bag, Hartsig said. The only reason tourism can happen so far north is because of a warming climate, but maybe that fact will inspire visitors to care more about the environment.

“For a lot of people, the Arctic is out of sight and out of mind, and if you have vessels like this taking people up to the Arctic to see firsthand this environment that maybe being an optimist about it, maybe that will be the thing that really registers with people,” Hartsig said.

There is, at least, a lot of interest. According to Crystal, the Serenity is sold out for this sailing and is filling up for another trip in 2017.

The Native corporation for the Southeast village of Hoonah is changing leaders.

Huna Totem CEO and President Larry Gaffaney will leave this fall after seven years on the job. He’ll be replaced by Russell Dick, current chairman of the corporation’s board of directors.

Gaffaney, who is not a shareholder, said he’s hoped for years to turn the reigns over to a tribal member.

“We’ve got a solid corporation and we’ve got an absolutely qualified, energetic and enthusiastic guy to take the helm. So the time’s absolutely right to do it,” he said.

Huna Totem has about 1,350 Tlingit shareholders with ties to Glacier Bay and Hoonah, about 40 miles southwest of Juneau. It employed about 110 shareholders last year.

It’s best known for its Icy Strait Point cruise-ship attraction, which was built around a renovated cannery.

Dick has been CEO of Sitka-based Alaskan Dream Cruises for about two and a half years. Before that, he ran Sealaska’s Haa Aaní subsidiary, which focused on regional business development. He’s also been vice chairman of the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority board since 2013.

Dick wasn’t available for immediate comment. Gaffaney said Dick grew up with Huna Totem.

“He certainly understands this corporation and its people and its mission down to his bones. He’s also got the requisite business experience to take it forward and he’s got the full support of the board,” he said.

Dick will be based at Huna Totem’s corporate headquarters in Juneau. Gaffaney said he will move on to another business opportunity after leaving the corporation, though he wouldn’t discuss details.

Huna Totem also runs Alaska Native Voices, a business providing cultural interpreters on cruise ships in Glacier Bay and other parts of Southeast.

A relatively new business is Dear North, which produces and distributes smoked and dried salmon treats.

Huna Totem does not release details of earnings. Its most recent shareholder dividend, in February, paid out $1.65 per share.

The cruise ship Infinity is on its way south for repairs.

The 90,000-ton ship crashed into a Ketchikan dock Friday afternoon, sustaining scrapes and a small hole above the waterline.

Editor’s note: There is some coarse language in this video of the collision.

That was welded that same day and the Celebrity Cruises vessel was cleared to leave for its final destination of Vancouver, British Columbia. Coast Guard spokesman Shawn Eggert said an investigation into the incident is ongoing.

Cruise-line officials didn’t respond to inquiries about the extent of damage, the cost of repair or the incident’s impact on later sailings. The Celebrity Cruises website lists 11 more seven-day, Inside Passage voyages this summer, with stops in Ketchikan, Juneau, Hoonah and at the Hubbard Glacier, near Yakutat.

Ketchikan Harbormaster Steve Corporon said damage to one of the Southeast Alaska community’s four cruise-ship berths totaled $2 million to $3 million.

He said a barge that acts as a dock and at least two of its three mooring dolphins were damaged. Witness videos also showed a catwalk knocked into the water.

Corporon said the dock will not be usable until it’s repaired, which could take at least a month. An engineer flew in to inspect the berth Saturday. More information is due out Monday.

With one berth out of use, Corporon said some cruise ships will have to anchor up in Tongass Narrows and come to shore via lightering boat. Others will shift docks. For example, the Celebrity Solstice will dock at Berth 4 Sunday and the Radiance of the Seas will tie up at Berth 2.

Witnesses and Corporon saw no indication of injuries. Longshoreman and others on the dock were able to get off before the ship struck.