An Air Station Kodiak MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter crew rescued a mariner Monday after his sail boat grounded between Seward and Chenega.
The 47-foot Lieveling lost power and went aground on Cape Puget, about 210 miles north of Kodiak.
The Jayhawk landed on the beach nearby to pick up the sailor and transport him to Seward. He was uninjured.
Watchstanders from Coast Guard Sector Anchorage received a radio call for assistance from the mariner reporting he was drifting toward the rocks and donning his survival suit.
The watchstanders issued an urgent marine information broadcast, diverted the Coast Guard Cutter Mustang, and requested an MH-60 and HC-130 from Air Station Kodiak for assistance.
The Mustang and Jayhawk crews arrived on scene about 2 p.m. and sighted the Leiveling hard aground with the mariner ashore.
There were clear skies and 2-foot seas at the time of the rescue.
Petersburg Mayor Mark Jensen. (Photo courtesy KFSK staff)
Petersburg’s mayor plans to attend an international conference on sustainable development in the arctic in January. Mark Jensen told the borough assembly Monday that Norwegian ambassador Kåre Aas invited him to the
Mark Jensen told the borough assembly Monday that Norwegian ambassador Kåre Aas invited him to the Arctic Frontiers conference January 22nd through the 27th in Tromsø, Norway. Aas visited Petersburg in May for the community’s Little Norway Festival.
“Another surprise after I got that invitation is they’re going to pay for travel, lodging and the conference costs, which I thought was pretty nice,” Jensen said.
“But I’m asking for approval from the assembly since you can’t receive any per diem if you travel outside the state. For per diem, during that trip, it’d be roughly $540. So if there’s any objections now would be the time to bring them up.”
Assembly members did not object to paying the cost of the mayor’s daily expenses during the trip. Arctic Frontiers will address questions about climate change and impacts to oceans and fisheries.
Keynote speakers include prime ministers from Norway and Finland, along with representatives from the science and business communities, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund.
Kevin Kennedy works on a piece of one of his oil spill cleanup devices. (Eric Keto/Alaska’s Energy Desk)
Cleaning up after a major oil spill is a huge challenge. After the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, for example, the federal government estimates responders removed only about a quarter of the nearly 5 billion barrels of oil released.
One Alaskan thinks he’s figured out a better way to do it. He doesn’t work in a lab, he doesn’t have any fancy degrees and he’s not backed by the government or a big company. But some experts think he might be on to something.
His name is Kevin Kennedy, and he spends a lot of time poking around what he refers to as his “mad scientist den.”
It’s a garage that smells strongly of oil, cluttered with mechanical parts and tools, right behind Kennedy’s house in South Anchorage. Here, Kennedy has poured his soul — and, he says, his retirement — into developing a new kind of oil spill cleanup technology.
Kennedy knows just how damaging an oil spill can be. On Good Friday in 1989, he was getting his shrimp boat ready for a day of work in Prince William Sound.
“I didn’t have any idea how big it was until I got three-and-a-half, four hours out of Whittier and got to Knight Island Pass,” said Kennedy. “And then you could smell it. And then you could start seeing it. And it just kept coming and coming and coming.”
That was Kennedy’s last day as a shrimper — he helped with the cleanup effort, instead. Since the Exxon Valdez, Kennedy has gone from occasional tinkering to all-consuming work to develop a better way to clean up oil spills.
On his website, Kennedy has posted videos of his inventions at work — there’s one of what he calls the Otter Skimmer chugging away on a spill off Louisiana’s coast. A net extends into the ocean, corralling the oil towards a little red pontoon boat. There, a device separates the oil from the water and pumps it into a storage container.
Kennedy claims it works a lot better than the equipment response teams use to clean up oil spills today.
“Nobody makes anything that works in Alaska until it hits the beach,” said Kennedy.
But for a self-taught, self-funded inventor like Kennedy, trying to break into the market has been a long, hard journey. Over the years, Matt Melton has heard Kennedy’s pitch a lot. Melton is general manager of an oil spill response team based in Anchorage called the Alaska Chadux Corporation.
“In the last 10 years that I’ve been in this business, Kevin’s been there, too,” said Melton. “He’s just always there — it’s quite amazing. He’s a unique man.”
Melton says Kennedy’s an unconventional figure in the oil spill response world — but he also thinks he may be on to something. He says Kennedy’s device is efficient at separating oil from water, which makes it easier to store the waste during a cleanup. Alaska Chadux Corporation can’t endorse his equipment, but on certain uniquely challenging spills, Melton says he thinks Kennedy’s device might come in handy.
“If I had an oil spill tomorrow and I called Kevin and he had one sitting on his shelf, I’d take it in a second,” said Melton.
But oil spill response teams like Melton’s still aren’t rushing to buy Kennedy’s technology. Most already have cleanup equipment on hand that meets all their requirements and they’re used to using that equipment. And some experts disagree with Kennedy’s assertion that the equipment hasn’t improved at all since the Exxon Valdez.
“The bread and butter — the basic equipment — hasn’t changed a whole lot… but there have been certain improvements to some of the equipment,” said Richard Bernhardt, who works on oil spill response with the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.
Bernhardt says skimmers have gotten a lot more efficient since Exxon Valdez. Barkley Lloyd agrees — he’s the president and general manager of Alaska Clean Seas, an oil spill response group on the North Slope. But Lloyd says that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement.
“You always want more,” said Lloyd. “It’s always great to have the solution to everything.”
Kennedy says he isn’t promising the solution to everything — but he thinks his spill technology is an important step in the right direction.
“I’d be a fool to sit there and say it’s because I’m going to save the world. When I first started into this, it was because I knew that there was a better way to do it.”
Kennedy is determined to keep pushing forward until response teams actually start using his invention to clean up oil spills. Then, he says he doesn’t want to invent another thing again.
Correction: According to NOAA, burning, skimming and direct recovery from the wellhead of the BP spill removed about a quarter of the oil released during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. NOAA does not count chemical dispersal as removal, as an earlier version of this story implied.
Pink salmon, plus an occasional silver and red, congregate in a pool above the weir before spawning. John Joyce says the males will put on displays and fight with other males as part of the competition for mating females which have already started a nest. (Photo by Matt Miller/KTOO)
United Fishermen of Alaska is beginning to get an idea of what its new Salmon Habitat Information Program – or SHIP – will look like. The program is aimed at engaging commercial fisherman around the state in salmon habitat issues.
UFA, which represents 35 Alaska commercial fishing organizations, conducted a survey this summer to understand what fishermen cared about. SHIP Director Lindsey Bloom said they were asked to list their priorities.
“Fisherman, while they’re concerned about a variety of issues, mining, climate change and pollution scored the highest,” said Bloom. “At a local level, people mentioned the proposed [Bristol Bay] Pebble Mine and mining development in the transboundary region as the most mentioned specific concerns.”
Fishermen’s worries about mining reaffirmed UFA’s previous advocacy for State Department involvement in transboundary mining. But, Bloom said the industry group hasn’t been heavily involved in climate change issues. She said the SHIP program will invite experts to UFA board meetings and engage the group in decision-making at the local, state and federal level.
When asked to rank several predetermined issues, habitat conservation ranked third behind product quality and fisheries management. Bloom noted that it did come in above concerns about prices at the dock.
“I found that very inspiring that there’s very clear value and recognition that protecting habitat and protecting the resource is more important than the bottom line of what we’re getting paid for salmon during any given season,” she said.
When it comes to obtaining information on the commercial industry, most listed Alaska Department of Fish & Game scientists as the most trusted source.
“They are closely followed by local and regional fishing groups and then United Fisherman of Alaska,” said Bloom.
Fishermen also think the state is doing well ensuring the stability of salmon fisheries. The survey did not ask about further budget cuts to Fish and Game during the state Legislature’s upcoming session.
Bloom said most wanted to stay engaged with the SHIP program via email. Social media was the second choice followed by traditional mail.
Bloom said the goal of the program is to focus UFA’s engagement on salmon habitat issues important to Alaska’s fishing fleet and help fishermen inform decisions and policy.
More than 500 people responded to the survey. Bloom said the program is open to everyone, not just UFA members.
For wildlife biologists, understanding the basics about an animal species is key. How long does it live? How many babies does it have? When it comes to marine mammals, collecting even this basic information can be a challenge.
But researchers at the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward have developed new way to track these elusive underwater creatures.
As the Science Director at the Alaska SeaLife Center, Markus Horning spends a lot of time thinking about harbor seals. In fact, he’s spent years trying to understand these animals.
There’s a lot we don’t know about harbor seals.
“We need data on survival, reproduction, the age at which female seals first breed and then how many offspring they have throughout their lives,” says Horning.
Because harbor seals spend so much time underwater and live in remote locations, he realized he would need to develop a special way to study them.
So, he created a tag, but not just any kind of tag. It’s a lightweight pill-shaped device about the size of a C-battery. And it’s filled with sensors: temperature, motion and light.
Horning surgically implants these tags into seals. Despite its small size, the tag collects mountains of data. It has a little transmitter, so it can send all of the data back to a satellite. But here’s the kicker: the tag can’t “talk” to the satellite when it’s inside the animal.
“To be able to reach a satellite at an elevation or 400 miles up in the sky, we need a very strong signal. Inside of the body, the signal is so weakened that we could never reach a satellite. So while the tag inside of the body, while the animal is alive, we can never hear from the tag. We don’t get any data,” he says.
The lightweight tag is filled with microscopic hollow glass balls to help it float. Once an animal dies, the tag eventually floats up to the water surface and transmits its information to a satellite.
“I would describe it as an electronic black box that is like a black box in an airplane. It stores information about the state of the airplane and in this case the state of the seal, but it’s doesn’t really transmit that until after something bad happens. In this case, it doesn’t transmit until after an animal has died,” Horing says.
All those years of information the tags collect can be a real gold mine for researchers like Horning. Not only can the tags tell how long an animal lived, they can also give us a good idea how it died.
“When we have a very abrupt temperature drop to ambient temperatures and when we have an immediate sensing of light and air, that’s when we assume the tag came out of the animal. Really the only way this could have happened is if the animal was dismembered by a predator,” he says.
This summer, Horning’s lab implanted tags in 10 harbor seals and released them near the Aleutian Islands. So far, they’re feeling hopeful. Based on pilot tests with Stellar sea lions, they have a 98 percent chance of receiving data once an animal dies.
They’re just not sure how long it’s going to take.
