Climate Change

The season’s first wildfires are getting attention. The Alaska Interagency Coordination reports a 25-acre blaze in the Palmer being worked by 13 firefighters, with smaller blazes in the Matanuska-Susitna Valley, on the Kenai and in the Fairbanks area, drawing responses or being monitored in recent days.

The early season wildfires are attributed to human causes. Division of Forestry spokesman Tim Mowry said the burning of brush and trash are common in the spring, and often start wildfires.

”We’ve seen a lot of problems with burned barrels as far as fires escaping,” Mowry said. “Just because you have a 55-gallon drum with a couple holes in it doesn’t make it a good burn barrel.”

Outdoor burning requires a permit, and Mowry said that’s been expanded this spring to include the use of burn barrels. Mowry said failing to follow burn rules can result in citations and fines if you start a wildfire.

“You can be held accountable for the suppression cost – twice the suppression cost – of that fire,” said Mowry.

Aside from human-caused starts, Mowry said the state is keeping an eye on two coal seam fires that have sprung up in the Healy area.

”They’re sort of burning all the time,” Mowry said. “Then when you get in some warm dryer weather they can pop up, produce flames, produce smoke which is sort of what’s happening now.”

Mowry said the coal seam fires are active earlier than normal, but will only be fought if they escape to surrounding lands.

Middle Kuskokwim River villages reported that river ice is beginning to move out in what is expected to be the earliest river breakup on record for those villages.

Bethel Search and Rescue Chief Mike Riley posted on the BSAR Facebook page that the Kuskokwim River ice around Aniak, Napaimute, Chuathbaluk, and Kalskag was moving around 4 p.m. Sunday.

According to the National Weather Service breakup database, the earliest breakup for Kalskag was April 22, 1940. The records go back to 1938.

Riley says the ice should be completely out within a few days.

Tim Oakley may by now finally have caught up on sleep lost during a monthlong expedition through northern Yukon Territory and Alaska, when he retraced the route taken more than a century ago by legendary Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.

He’s now working on a report of his journey for the Royal Geographical Society.

“We’ve been asked to write a paper showing comparative data on how it was for Roald Amundsen, in 1905 and what we experienced,” he said.

Oakley is a geographical society fellow, and he says his report will outline observations of many changes that’s occurred since Amundsen’s journey through the same stretch of wilderness Oakley’s three-man team traveled through on their grueling journey by dogsled from Herschel Island to Eagle, Alaska. Those changes include the disappearance of trails along the route – and the Native people who used them.

“Back in 1905,” he said, “all the Inuit and the Athabaskans were nomadic – trading and moving about and leading their traditional ways of life. Whereas today, now they all live in villages.”

Oakley says he thinks that reflects a change in the relationship between the Inuvialuit people and the land on which they’ve lived for thousands of years.

But Mike Koskey, an assistant indigenous-studies professor with UAF’s Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, says he think that’s a bit of an overstatement.

“The culture is not lost; the culture has changed,” he said. “Just as ours isn’t the same culture that our forefathers lived in, let’s say, the 17th century.”

Koskey’s spent years studying the indigenous peoples of Northern Alaska and Canada. And he agrees with Oakley’s view that Native people in the region have become less nomadic over the past couple of centuries. But Koskey says Arctic Native peoples’ relationship to the land remains strong, as shown by their continued harvest of food from the land and Arctic Ocean.

“Whether we’re talking about Inuit peoples or Athabaskan Dene peoples, their culture is still very much tied to the land,” he said.

Oakley says he’ll complete his report by September. And meanwhile, he plans to talk with students in the U.K., Norway and elsewhere about his journey.

Coastal cities across the globe are looking for ways to protect themselves from sea level rise and extreme weather. In the U.S., there is no set funding stream to help — leaving each city to figure out solutions for itself.

New Orleans and Philadelphia are two cities that face very similar challenges of flooding from rising tides. But they’ve chosen to pay for the solutions in very different ways.

New Orleans: Post-Disaster Payments And Grants Pave Future

“One of the biggest challenges of the next several decades is going to be water — either too much of it or not enough,” says Jeff Hebert, chief resilience officer in New Orleans.

In New Orleans, the problem is too much water. Hebert’s job is to help the city prepare for disasters like hurricanes and rising sea levels.

“You see a lot of driveways that are buckling, the streets that are buckling, you see the foundations of these homes that are buckling,” he says.

But it won’t look like this for long. In January, New Orleans won a $141 million grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to build a “Resilience District.”

It’s an experiment with pervious surfaces and water-absorbing parks located in Gentilly, one of the worst-hit areas after Hurricane Katrina. It’ll include water features in medians to reduce flooding, as well as lagoons and a pond.

Hebert points to a spot where he says a large sports field “will be allowed to inundate under water when it rains. You’ll see almost a creek that will go through here.”

The grant the city received is in addition to $2 billion in relief payments the city just received from FEMA for Katrina-related infrastructure damage.

Robin Keegan, who works with GCR, a consulting firm, helped the city apply for some of those grants. She says after Katrina, the city faced some hard choices.

“Every system that we had in place had to be looked at anew because everything was broken and we had to fix it,” Keegan says.

She says the reason it’s getting federal and private money to come up with new ways to deal with water, is because it’s already been hit again and again.

“New Orleans is identified as a place that has gone through that thinking and is actually setting up the best practices and the models,” Keegan says.

But of course, not every city has the cachet — or the same level of crisis — that New Orleans has.

Philadelphia: Billing Undesirable Practices To Spur Green Investment

In Philadelphia, those big checks from government and private entities aren’t rolling in.

On the one hand, the city isn’t as vulnerable as New Orleans. But some of its neighborhoods are expected to flood from rising tides along the Delaware River. To pay for upgrades, the city has to turn to its residents, who pay a stormwater fee each month. For most it’s only a few bucks, but for others it can be a handful.

Gina Rucci operates Popi’s, an Italian restaurant in South Philadelphia. Several years ago, she bought an adjacent property and turned it into a parking lot. Then she received a $330 bill.

“And I wasn’t thinking about a water bill because there was no water on the lot,” Rucci says.

It was a bill from the city for the water run-off from her parking lot. To reduce that bill, she recently found out about a program where the city encourages “green infrastructure” — things like rain gardens, tree trenches and green roofs.

“Once your own ground here becomes permeable, that water’s not going that way; it’s going to just sink,” Rucci says. “And that’s what you need it to do.”

Today, she has cut her water runoff bill by 60 percent.

So far Philadelphia has built hundreds of green infrastructure projects in streets, parks and parking lots.

Chris Crockett, an engineer with Philadelphia’s water department, is in charge of planning for climate change.

“Instead of doing these greener practices, we could just go and dig a hole to China and build a tunnel, but that has a huge carbon footprint,” Crockett says.

And green infrastructure is cheaper — especially compared to more traditional engineering approaches like building a large concrete tunnel to hold the extra water. That hole-and-tunnel approach would have cost the city’s ratepayers $10 billion and taken decades to complete. The thousands of rain gardens, green roofs, and tree trenches will cost the city around $2 billion.

Tegan Wendland is a reporter at member station WWNO and Susan Phillips is a reporter at member station WHYY.

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

Some 200 big rigs travel the Dalton Highway on an average day to bring supplies to the giant Prudhoe Bay oilfield complex. All that trucking requires regular repair work along the 414-mile mostly gravel road – an ongoing and costly challenge that could become even more if road-building technologies developed to protect permafrost under roadways no longer work.

“In Alaska and in the Arctic, the air temperatures are going up,” says Jeff Currey, an Alaska Department of Transportation engineer. “But they are not going up in the summertime so much as they’re going up in the wintertime. That’s when we need the cold temperature to make these technologies work, to drive that cooling of the permafrost.”

Jeff Currey, a materials engineer, has worked for decades building roads with air-circulating and thermosiphon technologies to keep the permafrost underneath from thawing. That makes soil under the roadbed sink and settle, creating dips and humps that require costly repairs. But Currey and other engineers say there’s now growing concern that warming in the far north may make those technologies ineffective here.

“We’re seeing that some of these techniques that we have become accustomed to, that are working very well for us, may cease to work maybe sometime midcentury, because of the temperature changes,” he said.

Billy Connor directs the Alaska University Transportation Center at UAF’s Institute of Northern Engineering. He says concerns about how long permafrost-preserving technologies will work in this part of Alaska came up again last month in a talk about the $54 million project to rebuild a stretch of the Dalton Highway about 75 miles north of Fairbanks.

“We asked the question – if it continues to warm, at what point will these technologies cease to work?” Connor said.

Currey says while engineers study new solutions, the existing technologies will continue to be used – farther north.

“A technology that works well in Fairbanks now will probably still work well in the Brooks Range sometime into the future,” he said.

Currey says some answers may come from data that’ll be generated by sensors to be buried in and around the Dalton project site.

Nationally, longer fire seasons and more destructive fires have put the Forest Service in a bad place: To pay the cost of fighting mega-fires, the agency has had to raid other programs, including its fire prevention budget. Sen. Lisa Murkowski supports a plan to end so-called “fire borrowing.” But Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell told her it’s not penciling out as they’d hoped.

Last year, more than half of the Forest Service budget was consumed by wildland fires, up from 16 percent two decades ago. Murkowski and Tidwell both support a new arrangement where Congress will move 30 percent of the firefighting expense from the Forest Service budget. If next year’s fire season costs more than Congress appropriates, some fires would be funded as natural disasters.

But looking over the Forest Service’s budget proposal for next year, Murkowski says she doesn’t see the agency making good use of the money it no longer needs to keep for emergencies.

“Because As I look at it, you’ve got a decrease in national forest management. Only a very small increase in hazardous fuel reductions,” she said at a hearing of an Appropriations subcommittee that she chairs.

The senator says Alaskans want to see more fire prevention, particularly after the 2014 Funny River fire on the Kenai Peninsula.

“In the wake of the fire, we had 11.3 million acres that were identified as high priority for fuels reduction,” she told him. “Again, folks at home are real concerned about what may be coming with this fire season.”

Tidwell told her they’re treating more acres every year to make them less fire-prone, but “yes there is a backlog out there that I’ve been very clear about.”

Murkowski questioned why the Forest Service wants to spend money on land acquisition, rather using those funds for fuel reduction and forest management.

“Well, (acquisition) is another one of our programs that has tremendous public support,” Tidwell said.

The Forest Service wants $66 million for land acquisition next year. That’s small compared to the nearly $400 million it’s seeking for hazardous fuels reduction, but Murkowski says it doesn’t make sense for the agency to buy more land when it can’t take care of what it has.

The real budget culprit, Tidwell says, is the ever-increasing cost of fighting fires. When they began trying to move some firefighting expenses out of the forest service budget two years ago, the chief said, they both assumed it would free up money for other programs.

“But what’s happened over the past two years is that cost of fire suppression, as it’s gone up, it’s basically eliminated that potential savings,” he said.

One reason for the growing cost is the longer fire season, and, when asked by one of the Democratic senators, Tidwell says the cause is climate change.

This month’s fire outlook for Southcentral Alaska also suggests an early start to fire season. With the low snowpack, forecasters say the risk of wildland fire is already above normal for the Anchorage Bowl and the Kenai Peninsula and will remain elevated until June.