Environment

The city of Kotzebue is under mandatory evacuation orders. That’s as the community prepares for flooding the National Weather Service warns could be worse than last year’s flood, which led to dozens of evacuations and two families losing their homes.

Flooding had already begun by Wednesday afternoon, and the Weather Service forecast said water could rise as high as 10 feet above the high tide line. Flood waters are expected to peak around 8 p.m. Wednesday night.

The city said Wednesday afternoon that the mandatory evacuation was issued to assist elders and to prepare residents to evacuate before dark. On Tuesday night, 28 residents stayed at Kotzebue Middle High School, which is the local evacuation point.

Kotzebue mayor Derek Haviland-Lie said first responders might not be able to reach people’s homes during the worst of the flooding.

“There may be a point, sometimes within the next 24 to 48 hours, that emergency services might not be able to make it to your home,” he said. “If that is the case, if you don’t go to the shelter, you’re going to have to shelter in place.”

As of this afternoon, barricades had been set up on the road past the airport and in other vulnerable areas of town. Haviland-Lie says the community should be prepared for power outages to several areas around town – including the airport area. Flights in and out of Kotzebue are also canceled.

“They’re worried about the water getting into their transformers that are out in the airport area. So there is going to be at some point where at least the airport is going to be without power. They have no choice,” he said.

The Kotzebue Electric Association is asking residents to report all outages and says that crews will respond when conditions are safe.

Flooding has already been reported in multiple sections of town including Front Street and the areas near Kotzebue’s airport and hospital. School is canceled Thursday. Both the city and borough closed early on Wednesday for non-essential workers.

The state also issued a notice Wednesday afternoon that it had activated its emergency operations center in preparation for a series of storms that are set to hit Western Alaska through the weekend. Kotzebue and other communities, including Kivalina, Shishmaref, Golovin, and Nunam Iqua, are expected to be among the hardest hit.

Residents in other Northwest Arctic communities have also reported that they’ve begun evacuating in preparation for the flooding. Kivalina residents are evacuating to higher ground at the school, located seven miles from the community.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

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Canagold representatives faced resistance from residents about their proposed New Polaris underground gold mine at an open house in Juneau last month. 

The mine site is a remote area where the Tulsequah River joins the Taku River in British Columbia, around 40 miles northeast of Juneau. As the mine goes through its environmental assessment across the border, some Alaskans feel they don’t have a meaningful say in the process. 

The Taku River runs through the traditional homelands of the T’aaḵu Kwáan. Butch Laiti is president of the Douglas Indian Association, which represents the T’aaḵu Kwáan. He said the tribe isn’t willing to gamble with the health of the river.

“We’re not gonna back down or give way, because there’s too much at stake here,” Laiti said. “If we lose the Taku, and then that’s it, it won’t come back. And that’s the bottom line, right there.”

The mine is projected to produce around 800,000 ounces of gold over about a decade. The project is part of a controversial wave of mining expansion in British Columbia upstream of the Taku, Stikine, and Unuk Rivers in Southeast Alaska.

Laiti said past mining projects in Canada set a precedent of damaging and neglecting the rivers that flow into Southeast. 

“I know you understand our nervousness, but a lot of that’s from the history of all the mining that comes out of BC,” Laiti said.

The Tulsequah Chief mine, located just across the river from the New Polaris site, was abandoned in 1957 and has been leaching unsafe levels of toxins, including aluminum, cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, mercury and zinc into the Taku River since. 

Canagold CEO Catalin Kilofliski said that the province is cleaning up the site, but it could take a decade. And he said it’s given mining a bad rap. 

“I think the issues you mentioned, unfortunately, that’s the legacy of mining,” Kilofliski said. This is the legacy we are faced with — miners too.” 

That legacy has continued. 

For instance, the Premier gold and silver mine in British Columbia was found responsible for releasing toxic materials into the Portland Canal Watershed for years near Hyder, Alaska, and was fined in March. Also this spring, the Red Chris copper mine in British Columbia was found to have leached heavy metals into the Stikine River Watershed. In September, the province fined that mine for failing to monitor the water. Last year, a failure at the Eagle gold mine in Yukon spilled cyanide into the Yukon River Basin. 

The state of Alaska signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding with British Columbia a decade ago meant to keep Alaskans informed about water quality beneath existing mines and to engage them in the public process for developing new mines. But some Alaskans say it’s not enough to make sure they’re heard or to protect the waters they depend on. 

So far, almost all of the public comments submitted on New Polaris were written with concern for the lower reaches of the Taku River in Alaska. 

Heather Hardcastle has been fishing at the mouth of the Taku River since she was a kid, and said the mine could harm this essential salmon run. She’s a campaign advisor at SalmonState, a nonprofit that advocates for salmon habitat across borders, and said the provincial government isn’t required to take Alaskans’ concerns into consideration. 

“We still don’t have any kind of binding forum through which those of us downstream have any meaningful say in whether or not and how a mining project is developed,” Hardcastle said. 

The U.S. has a treaty with Canada called the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909. It states that “waters flowing across the boundary shall not be polluted on either side to the injury of health or property on the other.” 

Despite pressure from Southeast cities and Alaska’s congressional delegation, the federal government has yet to raise the issue with the International Joint Commission, which is a framework for resolving issues under the treaty. 

Canadian officials are mandated to consult with Indigenous peoples on projects that could affect their territories. There’s an ongoing dispute about whether that mandate extends consultation to tribes across the border. 

Canagold signed an agreement with the Taku River Tlingit First Nation, whose territory is on the Canada-side of the border, that it won’t build the mine without their consent. It’s unclear when the First Nation will decide. The Taku River Tlingit First Nation did not respond to requests for comment.

New Polaris is now going through Canada’s environmental assessment process. A representative from Canagold said mine construction could start in 2027 at the earliest. 

Bering Sea crabbers will see a boost in catch limits this season, after years of cancellations and small harvests due to low snow and king crab stocks.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced Monday that it’s nearly doubling the harvest for the upcoming Bering Sea snow crab commercial fishing season from last year’s totals.

Fish and Game set the cap at 9.3 million pounds. That’s a low number compared to historic levels. In 1991, crabbers harvested more than 320 million pounds of snow crab.

The catch limit was set at 45 million pounds back in 2020, the year before the snow crab stock crashed. And the next year, the fishery closed for two seasons after more than 10 billion snow crabs disappeared from the region.

Researchers blamed warming waters from climate change for the crash.

Fish and Game now says survey results show increases in all sex and size groups compared to last year. Large males remain at historic lows, but the population is showing signs of stabilization and recovery after the recent collapse.

Officials said a return to colder ocean conditions and increased numbers, especially in juvenile crab, are reasons to be optimistic.

And for the first time, a portion of the harvest will be reserved for a hybrid snow-tanner crab. Those are crabs that share some characteristics of both snow and tanner crabs, like eye color and tooth shape.

Regulators said recent surveys show an “unprecedented” amount of the hybrid crab. To incentivize harvest of them, Fish and Game designated about 11% of the total snow crab catch to the snow-tanner mix. According to officials, the fleet will be encouraged to harvest about a million pounds of the hybrids from the “hybrid grounds.”

Meanwhile, Fish and Game also boosted the Bristol Bay red king crab catch limit by about 16% from last year, with a total harvest of about 2.7 million pounds. Tanner crab harvests more than doubled for the western district of the Bering Sea but dropped by almost 40% for the eastern area.

All of those fisheries open Oct. 15. The lucrative Bristol Bay red king crab has the highest priority harvest, as that fishery closes shortly after the new year. Snow and tanner crab both close in the spring.

The Petersburg Borough Assembly passed a resolution on Sept. 15 calling on state and federal authorities for help dealing with rising sea otter populations. Petersburg now joins Wrangell and Haines in asking for stronger otter management.

The Petersburg resolution urges authorities and stakeholders to collaborate in creating a sea otter management plan. It also asks the federal government to loosen regulations for how Alaska Native subsistence hunters can use harvested sea otters. Currently, hunted sea otters can only be used as “authentic Native handicrafts.”

Multiple Assembly members voiced their support, including Rob Schwartz.

“I crabbed commercially for 35 years,” Schwartz said. “One of the reasons I got out is because we know we’ve seen this over the decades, the exponential increase in the population of the sea otters.”

Sea otters were once wiped out in Southeast Alaska due to the fur trade, but their population has skyrocketed since reintroduction to the region in the 1960s. Those sea otters consume a lot of shellfish, putting them at odds with fishermen.

Proponents for sea otter management say otters are causing trouble for the local economy and ecology because they’re depleting the shellfish resource and taking harvest from fisheries.

While this resolution doesn’t change state or federal law, it asks for disaster assistance for crab and dive fisheries in Southeast.

Both Mayor Mark Jensen and Vice Mayor Donna Marsh offered to recuse themselves for potential conflicts of interest. Jensen currently holds a commercial Dungeness crab permit. Marsh’s husband is a commercial crabber, and she has also previously held a crab permit. The Assembly allowed both Jensen and Marsh to vote on the resolution.

Marsh proposed an amendment to broaden who could legally take sea otters. Currently, sea otters are federally protected under the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act, and can only be hunted by people who are one-quarter Alaska Native or an enrolled member of a coastal tribe.

The amendment, reviewed by the borough’s attorney, says that the Assembly would support regulations allowing sea otters to be taken by any Alaska resident with a valid hunting license.

The resolution with the added amendment passed 4-1, with Assembly member Jeigh Stanton Gregor opposed. He said he could not support the new amendment.

“I am definitely in favor of this resolution. I think action is needed on a variety of levels involving the sea otter population,” said Stanton Gregor. “But as far as I can tell, this resolution, if we include that amendment, would be in violation of federal law for the Marine Mammal Protection Act.”

This resolution is not legally binding; it’s a request for federal and state authorities to take action.

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Juneau is mulling over how to prepare for next year’s glacial outburst flood.

The city’s temporary levee protected most Mendenhall Valley neighborhoods from a record-breaking flood this summer, but it needs repairs and, potentially, some upgrades. Now, the U.S. government shutdown could complicate the city’s decision-making process.

City staff presented major questions about ways to protect Valley neighborhoods from flooding to Juneau Assembly members during a committee meeting Monday. The four largest questions are how high to build the levee for next year, whether to expand it, whether to sponsor a buyout program for those left unprotected and how to pay for those projects. 

In an interview, Deputy City Manager Robert Barr said the answers to some of those questions will depend on federal information and funding that might be delayed by the U.S. government shutdown. 

“That’s what we’ll be working on over the next week, is figuring out kind of who’s still at the table, who still can be at the table, and trying to kind of keep things moving as best as we can,” Barr said.

How high should the levee be?

Barr said the model that projected how the city’s levee would perform during the flood wasn’t entirely correct. 

“We certainly saw things in real life this summer that the model did not predict,” Barr said at Monday’s meeting. “And we got a little bit lucky with the height of the HESCOs and where things landed.”

The levee leaked, flooding a couple dozen homes. The city’s memo to Assembly members said floodwater also flowed over the top of the levee in some areas. 

So, how high should they build it? Experts won’t be able to forecast the height of the next glacial outburst flood until it’s underway. But record-breaking floods have grown over the past three years. It reached 15 feet in 2023, then 16 feet in 2024. The flood this August made the record at 16.65 feet. 

Barr said the city won’t be able to make an educated guess about how high to build the levee until researchers publish the data from this year’s flood. That data will include the volume of Suicide Basin, the speed of the torrent and how the river channel has changed. 

Aaron Jacobs is the senior service hydrologist at the National Weather Service in Juneau and a member of Juneau’s flood science team. He said the agency is exempt from the federal furloughs that began Wednesday because its work is deemed essential for public safety.

“The Weather Service work is going to go on,” Jacobs said. “So our analysis and our work of looking at the data and forecasting the events and stuff like that, that’s still going to go forward.”

The flood science team is made up of federal workers at the National Weather Service and the U.S. Geological Survey and scientists at the University of Alaska Southeast.

Jason Amundson, a glaciologist at UAS, said the university’s flood researchers haven’t been affected by the shutdown. But he said one of his colleagues at USGS went up to Suicide Basin on Tuesday to maintain the monitoring equipment before the agency’s staff were furloughed the next day. 

“He was able to get up and make sure the cameras were up and running and should be hopefully good to go through the winter,” Amundson said. 

He said he thinks the team will be able to get data to city decision-makers without delays, but that could depend on how long the shutdown lasts.

How to fund levee upkeep?

The second big question is how to pay for the levee’s ongoing maintenance. The stacked baskets of sand, called HESCO barriers, sustained an estimated $1 million in damage during the August flood. 

Earlier this year, the city used what’s called a local improvement district, or LID, to split the cost of building the barriers 60/40 with landowners in the flood zone. It was controversial. 

Barr said it might not be the best way to pay for upkeep. 

“LIDs aren’t really a mechanism to care for ongoing costs,” he said. “LIDs are a great mechanism to pay for big one-time upfront capital expenditures. That’s what they’re designed for.” 

The other options are to pay for upkeep with general city funds or to establish a service area, a designation that allows the city to offer specific services in that area. It means the city could charge landowners in the flood zone an additional tax. It would need a majority vote from registered city voters within service area bounds. 

Barr said one drawback is that the landowners wouldn’t know in advance how much they’d have to pay in additional taxes each year.

Expand the temporary levee?

The third major question is whether to extend the temporary levee to protect more properties. A proposed Phase 2 of the HESCO project would expand the levee both upstream and downstream, so it would stretch from Back Loop Bridge to just before Juneau International Airport. 

Phase 2 is estimated to cost roughly $19 million. That’s more than double the expected cost of the existing barrier, which hasn’t been finalized yet. Barr said it would be much more expensive because the riverbanks would need more boulders to armor against erosion. 

“There’s a much, much larger number of properties that aren’t already sufficiently armored,” he said.  

City staff said Monday that getting help paying for an expansion through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers or an act of Congress ahead of the next flood will depend on how long the shutdown lasts and what funding is still available when it ends. Either way, if the city decides to go forward with Phase 2, the Assembly will probably need to find a way to pay for at least some of it — perhaps through another LID or a service area.

But there’s another potential project that could expand flood protection. City Manager Katie Koester said the Army Corps is talking about a solution that could come sooner than its original seven-to-10-year timeline. 

Koester said Army Corps staff are working on a recommendation for what that solution would be and construction could start as early as the end of 2027. But she said moving that quickly would restrict the opportunity for public feedback, and the project still depends on continued federal funding. 

City staff said they don’t know where that plan stands now amid the shutdown, but if it moves forward, it could influence how much of Phase 2 the city decides to build.

A spokesperson at the Army Corps said agency staff were still working as of Wednesday. The spokesperson said it’s too early to comment on how quickly an expedited enduring solution could come.

Sponsor a View Drive buyout?

Finally, the fourth major question is whether to sponsor a federal buyout program for View Drive, the street that’s been hit hardest by flooding and is left unprotected by the city’s levee. A buyout would pay residents to leave, demolish their homes and transform the land into a park. 

If all 18 eligible properties participated, it would cost around $25 million. If the Juneau Assembly votes to sponsor it, the city would have to pay around $6 million. Federal staff working on this project at the National Resources Conservation District have been furloughed due to the shutdown and were unable to respond to a request for comment. 

The city plans to hold a special Assembly meeting to discuss these questions in detail on Oct. 30. City staff said final decisions won’t be made until December. 

Update: This story has been updated to clarify a statement made by a city official and include a statement from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

New Champion, who dis??? A historic night for three-time runner up, first-time Fat Bear Week champion, 32 Chunk! He defeated enormous elder 856 in the finals on Tuesday, ousting two-time title holder 128 Grazer.  

32 Chunk started the season strong but had a major setback when he showed up during mating season with a broken jaw. Lucky for him, a historic salmon run spelled a rags to fishes story for this busted up behemoth, and he managed to side-mouth slow-chew his way through summer. By the time Fat Beat Week rolled around, 32 Chunk had more than qualified in size, hustle and gains. 

He took the week one match at a time, but his bad boy history threatened to weigh him down. Could he make a comeback from the darkness of his past? Then, the bracket offered an unseen advantage: a final match against the only bear on the bracket with a rap sheet longer than his, 856. 

Oooh, the plot thickened! Ultimately, 32 Chunk’s grit and determination tipped the scale. We celebrate this impressive, massive, emphatically fat bear and all his resilience. Congratulations Chunk the Hunk! 

This was Fat Bear Week’s biggest year ever. Online, over 1.5 million votes streamed in from around the world. Offline, we saw some of the fattest fat bears to date, thanks to their top sponsor — salmon. Shout out to the ecosystem for being so dang epic, and big ups to all who preserve it.  

If you want to support Katmai Conservancy’s research, education and outreach, I encourage you to donate to their Otis Fund (named for beloved bear 480 Otis). This is their biggest fundraiser of the year and explore.org will match all funds donated before Oct. 4.

Our communities are interconnected. If you feel endeared to the bears of Fat Bear Week, I hope you’ll also nurture the wildlife in your area, and the wild life within yourself. The champions do more than survive; they engage with their world in their own extraordinary ways, with their own unique strengths and stories. 

May your story be as great as theirs.

May you be loved and protected.

May you eat well

and live large