Transportation

Emergency officials in Juneau are testing their response to a cruise ship security threat today.

Juneau Emergency Programs Manager Tom Mattice would only say that the drill involves a cruise ship and some type of large-scale security event. He declined to say what the exact scenario is.

“Because when you know what the event is ahead of time you come with your guns loaded to take care of a situation,” Mattice says. “What happens if a cruise ship crashes tomorrow? What are we going to do? We don’t spend 24 hours preparing for that. It just happens. That’s the way we exercise. It’s the way things happen in the real world.”

The exercise is part of the Alaska Shield 2014 statewide training program, sponsored by the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

The exercise will take place at the AJ Dock downtown between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. While there won’t be an actual cruise ship involved, about 40 volunteers will play the role of victims, who will be fake-rescued by real-life paramedics, firefighters and police. The Coast Guard and relief organizations like the American Red Cross will be involved in the scenario as well.

Mattice says the drill will test the communication of participants.

“When you get a large-scale event like this it’s much more than just the city working internally,” he says. “It’s the city working with its partners in response, whether that be the hospital or the Red Cross or other participants. So it’s not only how we individually coordinate, but how we coordinate and communicate together that’s really tested.”

Ensign Dwight Shaffer with Coast Guard Sector Juneau’s Response Division says anything from an oil spill to a mass rescue of a passenger boat can qualify as a maritime security threat. The agency has numerous response plans for different scenarios, and Shaffer says Coast Guard personnel are expected to know which plans to activate and when.

“They typically review them around four to five times a year, but it’s an ongoing cycle,” Shaffer says. “They’re constantly working them and making them better.”

Mattice says the city has its own Emergency Operations Plan, which gets reviewed and updated annually. While an earthquake or an avalanche might be more likely in Juneau, he says a cruise ship incident is still worth preparing for.

“We’re fairly fortunate in Juneau, it’s not number one on our radar, but we definitely don’t ignore it,” says Mattice.

Juneau gets about a million cruise ship visitors every summer. The first ship of the 2014 season is expected in less than a month. Cruise line officials declined to comment for this story.

Industry critic Chip Thoma with the group Responsible Cruising in Alaska agrees with Mattice that there’s not much to worry about. But he thinks any serious maritime security event would effectively end cruise ship activity in the state.

“Any serious incident would have a severe impact on the cruise ships, because there’s just no way that they would be able to guarantee the security coming out of Vancouver or Seattle,” Thoma says.

During the drill, at about 1:15 p.m., KTOO is expected to broadcast a test of the emergency alert system.

One passenger was killed and another was seriously injured in an accident that closed traffic on Yandukin Drive for three hours on Wednesday afternoon.

According to Juneau police investigators, a Honda CRV was traveling southbound on Yandukin Drive just after 4:30 p.m. Wednesday. The vehicle attempted to turn left on to Old Dairy Road, but did not stop for an oncoming semi-truck.

Jessica Louise Billy, 18, a passenger of the Honda, was declared deceased at the scene. Another passenger, an unidentified 20-year-old man, sustained critical injuries and was transported to Bartlett Regional Hospital. No injuries were reported sustained by the 18-year-old male driver of the Honda.

The 45-year-old truck driver was not injured.

Juneau police closed Yandukin at Old Dairy Road while they cleaned up debris and investigated the cause of the crash. Yandukin Drive was reported reopened to traffic at about 7:40 p.m.

Billy’s family members have been notified of her death.

Juneau Police Department officials say the investigation into the crash is continuing.

Original Post was published at 5:34 a.m.

 

City officials are moving forward with one of the Juneau Assembly’s top priorities: Development of the back side of Douglas Island.
As soon as this summer, Engineering Director Rorie Watt says the city will be ready to apply for permits to build a pioneer road at the end of North Douglas Highway. While it would be several years before any development takes place, Watt says the road would allow for more activity in the area called West Douglas.

“We want to make the land more accessible for exploration for development,” Watt told the assembly’s Committee of the Whole on Monday. “And by exploration I mean, make it easier for surveyors and engineers and geologists, biologists and prospective developers.”

The city has about $3.2 million for the road, mostly in the form of a state grant. The assembly has long talked about West Douglas as a possible site for future housing and commercial development.

Watt is recommending a 3-mile, one-lane gravel road, with periodic pullouts to allow vehicles to pass one another. He says a narrower road can be built farther than a more developed, two-lane street. Initially he says the road would be gated to prevent illegal dumping and other unwanted activities.

“In the short run, there’d be a fair amount of public recreational use,” Watt said. “And that might just be dog walking or mountain biking or hunting, winter skiing or some things like that.”

The entire road would be on city land, but allow access to property owned by Goldbelt Inc., Juneau’s urban village Native corporation. Over the years the city and Goldbelt have worked together on numerous proposals to develop West Douglas. Watt says that would still be the case.

“Goldbelt would certainly be involved. A lot of the development contemplated was on Goldbelt land,” Watt said. “Generally, Goldbelt’s view is they have a lot of shareholders and not a lot of land and they want to be really careful with the decisions that they make.”

While the road would span some tributaries of Peterson Creek, Watt doesn’t believe any of them are salmon-spawning streams.

The assembly generally seemed supportive of the proposal to build a one-lane pioneer road. Assemblyman Jesse Kiehl said it could be improved once the area is ready for development.

Kiehl also said he supports keeping part of West Douglas open to recreational activities.

“There’s a great deal of CBJ land back there on that side of Douglas,” Kiehl said. “The federal land gets pretty steep pretty fast, and the private land, trespass permits are not available. So, recreational access to the land on the backside of Douglas is really best accomplished through access to CBJ land.”

Watt says the most important permit needed will come from the Army Corps of Engineers. He says the corps can take six months to a year or more to issue the type of permit needed.

The assembly will hear an update on the project before the city applies for any permits.

Alaska Marine Highway officials want your comments on next fall and winter’s ferry sailings.

A draft schedule for October of 2014 through April of 2015 is now available online. A teleconferenced public hearing will be on April 8th.

The schedule lists some changes, many due to off-season layups and repairs.

Read the schedule documents.

For example, the small Southeast ferry LeConte will get a new bow thruster next winter. It’s been breaking down and delaying sailings.

General Manager John Falvey says the thruster controls the side-to-side movement of the forward hull.

“It’s old. It’s 20 to 25 years old. And in this next federal project this winter we’re going to completely replace that bow thruster and we hope that those problems will come to an end,” Falvey says.

The Aurora, the LeConte’s sister ship, will sail in its place. It’s usually in Prince William Sound.

The Kennicott and the Chenega will also be in for repairs next winter.

All 11 marine highway vessels will also undergo routine overhauls.

The finished schedule will only be posted online. Falvey says the printed brochures used for decades were expensive and sometimes wrong.

“Our system is so complex that book, in many cases … would be outdated before it was printed, because of changes. This changes and that changes. So the information you get online is up to the minute,” Falvey says.

The April 8 schedule teleconference will take Southeast testimony starting at 10 a.m. Comments from those in Southcentral and Southwest will follow at 1 p.m.

To join in, dial (800) 315-6338. The conference code is 3902#.

Written comments can be emailed to dot.amhs.comments@alaskagov.org or faxed to (907) 586-8365 by April 5th.

The government of Canada’s Yukon Territory is asking Congress to pay for reconstruction of the Alaska Highway. Premier Darrell Pasloski  was in Washington last week to make the case. The United States and Canada agreed in 1977 to work together to improve the northern section of the Highway, as well as the spur from Haines Junction to the border near Haines. The U.S. agreed to pay for construction and Canada would pay maintenance and operation. Premier Pasloski says  the funding should continue.

“This has been a great deal for the U.S. Taxpayers because the U.S. Congress has put up approx 25 percent of the money into this highway, however, about 85% of the traffic is U.S. traffic,” he said.

The U.S. paid more than $400 million before Congress stopped funding in 2012. Part of the Haines road still needs resurfacing, but the bigger challenge is a long section further north, where the road is on unstable permafrost.

Matt Shuckerow , a spokesman for Alaska Congressman Don Young, says the road is a vital link between Southeast and the Interior. But the U.S. Highway Trust Fund is stretched thin, so Shuckerow says  it’s not an easy sell in Washington.

“Members here in Congress have very little appetite to send money to places like Canada when in fact we lack funds to take care of our highway issues here in the United States,” he said.

Shuckerow says Young believes the U.S. should live up to its obligation to pay for the highway, but it will take sustained pressure from Canada, the state of Alaska and the Alaska congressional delegation.

Twenty-five years ago, Marta Lastufka saw a puzzling ill omen at a party where a woman was giving readings with tarot cards.

“And everybody kept getting this scary card, it was like, the death card, or something,” says Lastufka, a page for the Senate Finance Committee. “She said, ‘You know, I don’t know what this means, but something is going to happen that’s going to affect all of you.’ And that was probably just a few days before the Valdez oil spill. And then we realized, oh, that was it.”

The Exxon Valdez tanker ran aground 25 years ago today, spilling hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil in Prince William Sound. Around the state Capitol Building, the memories for many are still fresh.

The spill brought a frenzy of activity to Alaska, including workers, reporters and profiteers.  Legislative aide Ron Clark had a front seat. He was a special assistant to Gov. Steve Cowper. Clark and the governor flew up to Valdez a few days after the spill.

After they got off the plane, Clark remembers the governor asking him, “Are you ready for this?”

“And I said, ‘I dunno, what’s this?’ He says, ‘You’ll see,'” Clark recalls. “The doors open and, like, two dozen Klieg lights flash on. All these camera lenses suddenly are trained on him, microphones being thrust at him, and people shouting questions, and, and, he kind of pauses before he wades into this, and he turns to me and says — ‘That’s ‘this’. This is what I meant.’ And he just — pwoo! — walked into this amazing scrum of press people.”

Clark says entrepreneurs came, too, by the thousands, clawing for a few minutes of the governor’s time to hawk their cleanup solutions. His voice tightens as he imitates the frantic tone: “Here, governor, here! Here’s the cure to the spill, here’s what you need to–this product is just what you need!”

He calls it a bizarre and surreal time. One man tried to sell nylon mesh bags full of chicken feathers as an alternative to oil boom. Within a few weeks, bankers’ boxes filled with spill-related mail lined the hallways of the Capitol’s third floor, Clark says.

“You know, there was a whole section on sea otters. You know, oiled sea otters: Clean them and release them? Kill them humanely? Every category of letter had a banker’s box, and we just had piles and piles and piles of these letters that just kept pouring in,” Clark says.

The impact wasn’t so immediate for Sen. Gary Stevens. He was in Kodiak at the time teaching history. There, the first weeks were part of an awful waiting game.

“I’ve heard people say anything that falls in the water in Prince William Sound is going to wind up on the beaches of Kodiak,” Stevens says.

The news reached Kodiak weeks before the clumpy oil balls fouled the beaches.

“It was just a horrendous experience as we watched that oil over time slowly move out of Prince William Sound and eventually hit the beaches of Kodiak. We knew it was going to happen, and it was just like one of those inexorable things that you know it’s going to happen, you know it’s going to happen, and then finally it does,” Stevens says.

Stevens remembers the sight of oiled birds, oiled animals and the oiled workers trying to clean it all up.

The workers at sea needed a way to clean themselves up, too. Rep. Paul Seaton was a commercial fisherman at the time and one of his fish tenders was repurposed for just that. He put an old house with a boiler and tanks aboard the ship to supply fresh water and serve as a decontamination unit.

“Because all these people were out there cleaning up and they had no place to take showers, or wash, or wash any clothes for the first part. And so we became the vessel that was out there providing cleanup for the clean-uppers,” Seaton says.

For the most part, the oil has come and gone. Still, Stevens says sharing these stories is important.

“Because it needs to be commemorated. It was something that we just cannot forget. It happened. It really happened, it’s a part of our history and we can’t forget the impact that the oil spill, the Exxon Valdez oil spill had on Alaska,” Stevens says.