Environment

It’s been almost two years since Juneau’s glacial outburst flood got out of hand. 

On that August day, the water level rose swiftly on the Mendenhall River. That wasn’t unusual. Local experts had been tracking water levels in Suicide Basin — the glacial lake high up on Mendenhall Glacier that fills with rain and meltwater every summer — for years and gave ample notice of the annual release.

But unlike in previous years, the water level rose to nearly 15 feet.

“There is no comparison,” National Weather Service Meteorologist Nicole Ferrin told KTOO at the time. “We’re two feet over our last record.”

One unoccupied house crashed into the swollen river. Other homes had their foundations exposed by the eroded riverbank.

The event caught everyone off guard, including those of us in the newsroom. Aside from some erosion and moderate flooding that threatened a few homes along the river, the annual outburst flood was in many ways more of a novelty up to that point.

The next year, the flood was even bigger and the consequences were much more serious. Hundreds of homes flooded when the river crested at 16 feet. 

KTOO Climate and Weather Reporter Anna Canny covered the aftermath of both record-breaking events. Last fall, she proposed a series examining the floods and secured funding from the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism to help make it happen.

Now, as Juneau residents and officials prepare to take on a potential third year of flooding, our newsroom has a new series, Outburst, that takes stock of the evolving threat and efforts to keep residents safe.

Although Anna left Juneau at the beginning of the year to pursue new opportunities, this series would not have been possible without her. 

Climate and Environment Reporter Alix Soliman joined the newsroom in February and dove headfirst into flood reporting, picking up right where Anna left off. She’s reported extensively on the construction of HESCO barriers along sections of the river and preparations ahead of this year’s flood and hosts the series. 

ACEJ’s grant supported this four episode series, as well as outreach efforts to make sure information about the flood gets to the people who need it. Those included a community public safety barbecue this July and a set of maps that show the evolving course of the river, its flood paths and the recession of the Mendenhall Glacier.

Outburst premieres in early August. Find it here at ktoo.org/outburst, on the radio and wherever you get your podcasts.

 

Two black bear cubs were electrocuted to death after climbing a utility pole in downtown Juneau Monday night, temporarily knocking out power in part of the Flats neighborhood.

Juneau residents have seen the family – three cubs and a mother bear – wandering downtown in recent weeks.

Tara Thornton witnessed the incident on West 12th Street around 11:00 p.m. 

She said she heard people hollering and saw a car turn around in her driveway, so she went outside and saw that a bear had made a mess of the trash. As she and her husband cleaned up, they heard a zap.

“Moments later, we see a bear cub fall from the top of the telephone pole,” she said.  

The cub died. Thornton said people gathered around to see what was happening, which didn’t help the situation. She and her neighbors tried to direct traffic away from the scene so another cub would feel safe to climb down. 

Meanwhile, she said the sow was pacing nearby and trying to carry both her dead cub and its wailing sibling away from the crowd. 

Roy Churchwell, Alaska Department of Fish & Game’s regional management coordinator, and his colleague arrived at the scene after the first cub died. They managed the onlookers.

“We’d ask them to go into their houses and kind of quiet things down, and that was happening,” he said.

In situations like this, he said the best way to protect bears is to give them space.  

But then, the cub that was still up on the utility pole hit the transformer. The electric shock killed it instantly and knocked out power in part of the Flats neighborhood.

Churchwell said it sounded like a gun went off. 

Thornton said this could have been prevented. Now, she wants to see metal sleeves or other barriers go up on the utility poles in town to keep bears from climbing to their deaths.

Churchwell said a third cub survived the ordeal and appeared uninjured with its mother when he was called to respond to the sow chasing someone in the Evergreen Cemetery Tuesday morning. 

It’s been three weeks since the Alaska Department of Fish and Game seized dozens of animals from a popular wildlife attraction outside Haines. But a number were left behind, and now the owner is now calling on the state to return to the property and retrieve them.

Fish and Game reported removing 39 animals from the Kroschel Films Wildlife Center in late June amid ongoing concerns about the facility and the animals it houses. But a recent inventory lists closer to 60 animals, which leaves about 20 unaccounted for.

The discrepancy is the latest dispute in a years-long saga between the agency and the center’s owner, Steve Kroschel, over animal welfare and permitting concerns at the popular tourist destination.

The facility has been closed for nearly a year after losing its required permits. Fish and Game and Alaska Wildlife Troopers raided the center last month after executing a search warrant that indicated Kroschel is under investigation for animal cruelty. Two animals died during the operation.

“We’re working on just going back through and double-checking to determine how many of each species still remain there,” said Ryan Scott, who directs the department’s division of wildlife conservation.

Kroschel, for his part, is calling on the agency to retrieve the rest of the animals as soon as possible.

In a Wednesday email exchange with Fish and Game seen by KHNS, he raised concerns over animals that were left behind – and about others he thinks escaped, including several weasels and an arctic fox.

“What is important is that you and those under your direction finish what you have started,” he wrote. “Animals require care 24 hours a day 7 days a week.”

Reached via text on Thursday evening, Kroschel reiterated that point.

“How the heck do they think I am supposed to maintain freezers, phone, time, care, etc without any revenue for a year now?” he wrote, in a nod to the revocation of his federal permit to operate last summer.

Kroschel is not currently at the facility. He said he is in Russia working on a documentary, but that another staff member is on site and caring for the animals.

The agency says it’s working to resolve the discrepancy and always planned to return for the rest of the animals.

Asked why that hasn’t happened yet, Scott, of the wildlife conservation division, said, “there’s more at play there that I can’t discuss.”

He said he doesn’t have any information about animals escaping, adding that staff were “extremely careful” during the operation to avoid that.

Scott also said that as he sees it, it’s Kroschel’s responsibility to take care of any remaining animals.

“We took over two-thirds of the animals, so that leaves a whole lot of resources for what he has left,” Scott said. “In my opinion, it’s his responsibility to maintain care for them until we can get there to take them.”

The agency said earlier this week that 37 animals have been temporarily placed in three Alaska facilities: The Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center in Portage, the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage and Bird TLC in Anchorage.

The agency added that some of the animals will remain in those facilities permanently. Others could be moved elsewhere, such as educational facilities in Washington, Minnesota, Colorado and Canada.

An Alaska Wildlife Troopers spokesperson said the investigation is ongoing and no charges have been filed.

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Juneau’s next annual glacial outburst flood will test a temporary levee the city installed this spring for the first time. Although city officials said they expect it will protect residents, they want everyone in the flood zone to evacuate anyway.

Suicide Basin is almost full. Once the glacial dam releases, the basin could unleash a torrent down Mendenhall River. As the flood approaches, the community is preparing for the worst-case scenario. 

The levee that was installed to protect most neighborhoods in the Valley is made up of HESCO barriers — large metal baskets lined with fabric and filled with sand, which are stacked in backyards along the river.

Ryan O’Shaughnessy is Juneau’s emergency manager. He said an analysis the city commissioned from engineering firm Michael Baker International shows that the levee should hold back floodwaters properly. 

But he said people shouldn’t bet their lives on that. 

“We’re extremely confident in the HESCO barriers,” O’Shaughnessy said. “We’re still recommending that people evacuate. You just cannot be too careful with life and, you know, the potential for death or injury.”

If the levee fails, O’Shaughnessy said it would trigger a flash flood and people wouldn’t have much time to escape. 

“It will be difficult to extract anyone in a search and rescue operation with water moving that swiftly,” he said.

So he recommends that Valley residents pack go-bags in advance and arrange to stay with friends or family in areas outside the flood zone. 

The city and U.S. Geological Survey plan to watch how the levee performs during the flood using drones and other cameras. O’Shaughnessy said the city will bolster the levee with large sandbags called supersacks if they see extreme bank erosion. 

“Where there are those bends in the river, where we’ve historically seen that kind of activity, are the places that we’re prepared to respond to it,” he said. 

Those bends include the corner of Riverside Drive and Killewich Drive, along Meander Way and near Dimond Park. 

Evacuation Timeline 

The city plans to issue an evacuation warning as soon as the remote camera in Suicide Basin shows the water is draining out — that’s the same time that the National Weather Service will issue a flood warning. 

The evacuation notice will buzz on cell phones located in the Juneau area through a federal alert system. But to ensure you receive a warning — even if you’re not in the area at the time — O’Shaughnessy said residents should sign up for the city’s alert system.

From the moment the evacuation warning is issued, Valley residents will have an estimated 36 hours to get out of the flood zone before floodwaters reach the river.

City officials will publish a map of the flood zone when the National Weather Service issues a forecasted flood height. Forecast updates are likely to come about a day later. Residents can also see if their home is in the flood zone by plugging the forecasted height into the interactive map at juneauflood.com and toggling “HESCO Barriers OFF.”  

Floyd Dryden will serve as an emergency shelter during the flood. Its gymnasium can hold around 50 cots. Folks with RVs will be able to park in the lot and there will also be an area where people can pitch tents outside.

Britt Tonnessen is the community disaster program manager for the Red Cross of Alaska in Southeast. She said the shelter will be available for as long as Valley residents need it. 

“If it happens during the day and the flood clears out, maybe it’s just an evacuation point,” Tonnessen said. “If it happens in the night, it could be a sheltering situation.”

People who stay at the shelter can expect a cot, food and access to information and services. Tonnessen said that the Red Cross is prepared to assist elders and those with disabilities and medical needs.

“If people are separated from medication, durable medical equipment — we have disaster health services volunteers, and they try to more immediately reconnect those people with those services,” she said.

Ahead of the flood, Tonnessen is still accepting volunteers and said that those interested can sign up on the Red Cross website. 

In a Facebook survey, Valley residents affected by the floods said they need help filling sandbags and setting them up on their properties. 

The city, the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska and volunteers with United Way will be handing out free sandbags at the Dimond Park field house this Saturday and July 26 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. 

Correction: A previous version of this story stated that the annual glacial outburst flood was forecast to begin Aug. 8. That’s when the National Weather Service projects Suicide Basin will be full. Also, NWS can only forecast when the basin will be full, not when it will release.

Researchers have been spreading across rural Alaska to conduct a long-term study on the regional effects of climate change, collecting evidence in parts of Bristol Bay.

The Polaris Project is a research initiative led by scientists from universities across the country, funded by the National Science Foundation. It’s in its fifth and final year of studying how climate change is impacting social well-being, subsistence lifestyles, and community infrastructure in Arctic communities.

“We know that the Arctic is one of the regions that has been studied the least,” said Dr. Guangqing Chi, professor of rural sociology, demography, and health sciences at Penn State, and lead researcher on the Polaris Project.

Chi’s team has been conducting research in Dillingham, Port Heiden, Kotzebue, and Chevak, focusing on three key areas: food, migration and erosion.

According to the National Climate Assessment, Alaska is warming at a rate twice the global average, leading to changes in habitat, receding sea ice, and thawing permafrost.

The assessment indicates that as permafrost thaws and sea ice retreats, coastal bluffs become increasingly vulnerable to erosion.

In Dillingham, Polaris Project researchers established erosion monitoring sites at community-selected locations throughout the city.

They found that in certain areas, the shoreline is eroding at a rate of 5.21 meters per year. In other areas, that number is 10.69 meters per year.

“We also heard that the cave in the hospital area has been falling off, kind of becoming dangerous,” Chi said.

Erica Gavenus is a postdoctoral scholar at Penn State and a researcher on the project. She says the data can help the community prepare for potential futures.

“There’s been work on the assessment of the rate of erosion and then projecting out how long it will be before it reaches certain points,” Gavenus said. “They’ve learned some of those findings, and have shared those back with the city of Dillingham to help with planning in those ways.”

Coastal erosion is already creating a need for community migration and mobility across Alaska.

For example, in Newtok, a Yup’ik village on the Ninglick River, coastal erosion has forced the entire community to relocate – a project that’s still underway.

But, Gavenus says moving is not always an option. In other cases, it may be a tough decision.

“I think one of the things that was coming out in some of the research is that, especially in rural Alaska, there’s a lot of reasons why people are very committed to staying,” Gavenus said. “Whether that’s staying in their physical location or staying with that family and broader community and the social networks they have.”

The researchers are also examining the impact of climate change on food security.

In partnership with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the Polaris Project conducted a subsistence study in 2021, finding that 97% of households in Dillingham utilized subsistence resources, either by harvesting them themselves or through community sharing.

Gavenus says they observed consistency in the resources being harvested, but the composition has changed, and the amount has decreased by roughly 18 percent over the last four decades.

The study found that harvesting certain wild resources, such as Chinook salmon and large land mammals, is becoming more challenging than in the past.

They also found that food security is higher in Dillingham than in both Alaska and the U.S. as a whole.

Chi says subsistence practices have an impact on migration.

He says a lack of access to food resources can force people to leave their communities, but food can also drive people back.

“There’s also the food and the culture driving people back,” Chi said. “You know, not necessarily just the food as food, but it’s the culture. You get together with your family, with your friends. So it’s really two directions for that.”

The Polaris Project will conclude on Aug. 31, with final reports available to the public on their website. But the researchers say their work in the study regions will continue, helping communities adapt as the Arctic continues to change.

For the first time, scientists have made a definite link between the toxin produced by algae that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning and marine mammal deaths.

Fur seals found dead last August on Alaska’s St. Paul Island had significant levels of saxitoxin in their bodies, as did several of the dead fish around them.

It was the clearest evidence ever found for this type of toxin-caused death, scientists say.

“I would say this is the absolute strongest case for saxitoxin poisoning in marine mammals anywhere,” said Kathi Lefebvre, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research biologist and the lead author of a study detailing the findings, published in the journal Marine Mammals Science in May.

The discovery, a warning for local communities that rely on subsistence hunting, comes as long-term warming in the Bering and Chukchi seas is increasing the prevalence of a type of algae that produces saxitoxin is becoming more prevalent in these bodies of water.

Dangerous blooms of the Alexandrium have long been observed in more southern waters of Alaska, where paralytic shellfish poisoning is a well-recognized and sometimes deadly hazard. Clams are notorious for accumulating saxitoxin, and there are frequent safety advisories that warn people of specific sites’ shellfish poisoning dangers, and two labs in the state — one in Anchorage operated by the Department of Environmental Conservation and one in Sitka operated by the Sitka Tribe of Alaska — test harvested shellfish to determine whether it is safe for human consumption.

Farther north, the emergence of large Alexandrium blooms and potentially dangerous saxitoxin levels is new. But, as Lefebvre explains it, the conditions to create those toxin hazards have been set up over decades and possibly even centuries.

Over time, ocean currents have carried bits of Alexandrium algae north, and over time, that algae has dropped to the bottom of the ocean. That created massive beds of dormant cysts, the equivalent of algal seeds.

The Bering, Chukchi and even Beaufort seas hold some of the highest concentrations of Alexandrium cysts ever found in the world, according to Don Anderson, a harmful algal specialist with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Anderson led research teams that mapped out Alaska cyst beds over several years, including a bed in the Chukchi that he said is the biggest ever discovered.

Those cyst beds were dormant until recently, said Lefebvre, who works closely with Anderson.

“They’ve just been building and building and building. And then in the last couple decades – actually, the last 10 years, maybe — the bottom temperature finally was warm enough for cyst germination,” Lefebvre said. That appears to be the cause of the large blooms now being found routinely in the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas, she said.

Dead fur seals and fish

In the case of the St. Paul fur seals, local beachcombers found 10 dead animals at a site on the northeastern side of the island called Benson Beach. It is a catchment site where marine debris, kelp and other items are known to accumulate, said Lauren Divine, director of the island’s Tribal ecosystem conservation office.

Tribal representatives managed to retrieve some of the dead seals, as well as some of the dead fish with them, said Divine, who works for the Aleut Community of St. Paul Island. They photographed the scene and gathered whatever information they could, and they contacted the NOAA-coordinated Alaska Marine Mammal Stranding Network and Anchorage-based veterinarian pathologist Kathy Burek-Huntington to continue the investigation, she said.

It was clearly a startling discovery, Divine said.

“This was something that everyone was quite alarmed (at) and noticed as something that was wrong in the ecosystem and something that really hadn’t ever been noticed or detected before,” she said. “So we were pretty adamant about really trying to do the best job that we could to collect as much information as we could about the event, and also with quite little capacity that we have out in the remote community.”

In all five of the adult seals tested, saxitoxin was found in feces or urine, significant because they indicate higher exposure when tainted food was eaten. Two fish were sampled as well, and both turned up saxitoxin in their intestines.

At about the same time, samples being taken by researchers in the southeastern Bering Sea — the same area where the dead fur seals would have been foraging — revealed dense Alexandrium blooms, large cyst beds and extremely high prevalence of saxitoxin in fish, zooplankton, clams and worms.

Anderson, who noted that his team has already found a huge Alexandrium cyst bed near St. Paul, the seal discovery is significant for two reasons.

“The seal mortality demonstrates that dangerous levels of toxin can accumulate there and that local communities need to be careful about what they consume during certain times of the year,” he said by email.

Additionally, because scientists know that ocean currents run north from that region, “this might be yet another source of cells that can affect the Alaskan Arctic,” he said.

Lefebvre said all the evidence about the seals’ bodies, the fish samples and the environmental conditions were needed to show that the algal toxins killed the seals.

Up to now, it has not been possible to prove such a strong link between saxitoxin and marine mammal deaths, she said.

Mammals poisoned by saxitoxin are likely to disappear while at sea, she said. “They become paralyzed. They’re going to basically suffocate, not even drown, not even taking a breath of air, of water,” she said. “They’re going to just stop breathing.”

That contrasts with effects of a different type of algal toxin that, since the 1990s, has caused mass strandings and deaths since 1990 of marine mammals in California. That toxin, domoic acid, is produced by the Pseudo-nitzschia algae. Rather than causing paralysis, it overstimulates the nervous system, causing seizures that can result in death.

Lefebvre and others have documented thousands of cases of domoic acid poisoning among marine mammals in California, including sea lions, dolphins, seals, and whales, with animals easily seen by people on the beach. Mass die-offs of seabirds have also been documented.

So far, there have been no domoic acid poisoning cases documented in Alaska, though Lefebvre and her colleagues have consistently found low levels of it in various marine mammal species.

But a new study suggests that continued warming may make domoic acid a future problem in Alaska. The study, also led by Lefebvre, found that bowhead whales hunted over a two-decade period carried higher levels of both saxitoxin and domoic acid in years when waters were warm and sea ice was low.

Saxitoxin risks in various wild foods?

For now, saxitoxin and the paralytic shellfish poisoning it causes remain the main algal toxin concern in Alaska.

Among people, there were 132 reports of paralytic shellfish poisoning between 1993 to 2021, with the highest prevalence in Southeast Alaska and the Kodiak Archipelago, according to a bulletin published in 2022 by the Department of Health’s epidemiology section. The last fatal case concerned a person who ate shellfish at Unalaska Island.

Information about saxitoxin poisoning in wildlife has been more difficult to pinpoint.

In past years, it was suspected in some marine mammal deaths in Alaska, but it was not proven.

In the fall of 2017, four dead walruses found in the Bering Strait region had saxitoxin in their stomachs or intestines. They were among 39 walruses that, though otherwise in good body condition, were found dead in the region that August and September.

Two years later, another piece of the puzzle came when scientists retrieved clams from the Bering Strait area and the Chukchi Sea that had levels of saxitoxin above the thresholds for safe consumption by humans. That added another piece to the puzzle. Clams are an important part of the Pacific walrus diet, though the saxitoxin threshold for walruses has yet to be determined.

There are other suspected cases. For example, saxitoxin poisoning was a suggested cause of a 1987 sea otter die-off in the Kodiak Archipelago, though test results were inconclusive.

Beyond mammals, Alaska seabirds are known to have been killed by saxitoxin. That toxin caused a 2019 die-off of Arctic terns in the Juneau area; the birds had been feeding on sand lance, a type of fish known to accumulate saxitoxin.

For people in St. Paul and elsewhere in Western Alaska, who live far away from the two Alaska labs that currently test shellfish for toxins, the new information is concerning, Divine said.

St. Paul residents and others in the Pribilof Islands harvest various types of animals beyond the clams and mussels that are routinely screened for consumption safety, she said. But there is not much known yet about saxitoxin levels in the full breadth of subsistence foods, she said. “We just don’t have robust information on how much is accumulating and how things are impacted across the food web,” she said.

A grant from a NOAA program called ECOHAB funded much of the work that supported the new study. The grant for that work, which is led by Lefebvre and Anderson, runs through this year.

Anderson said the team just learned that it has been awarded ECOHAB grant funding for another year of work, part of what had been planned as a five-year follow-up program to better understand the saxitoxin risk in wild foods gathered in Indigenous subsistence harvests.

News of the one-year award is encouraging, but the scientists are worried about future years, Anderson said

The Trump administration has targeted NOAA for deep cuts, he noted. The administration is proposing to entirely terminate NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Sciences, the agency arm that supports research into algal toxins.

Termination of the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Sciences would end funding for NOAA’s entire Integrated Ocean Observing System. Within the IOOS is the Alaska Ocean Observing System, which monitors algal blooms, among other work.

Divine said the same people who have been drawn together by their concerns about toxins in the food web are also worried about the potential loss of scientific research.

“We have just an incredible amount of interest in this, and the funding that has been secured to really tackle this in a coordinated way is all on hold in this administration. And I do think that that’s worth noting,” she said.