Weather

Two Ketchikan elders are cleaning up and looking for a new place to live after the roof of their rented home was blown off during a big storm last week.

Marge and Frank James were in bed, not quite asleep after a restless, stormy night. It was past 1 a.m., and Frank James says the lights suddenly went out, and then Marge heard “thunder.”

“I said, ‘it’s not thunder,’” he said. “’It’s something else, bouncing across the roof.’”

Actually, it was the roof – or the top portion of it, anyway. It peeled off the house during a particularly strong gust. The couple was immediately inundated with water.

“Must be over 50 spots in the master bedroom where it was pouring down. I mean literally pouring, not dripping. Pouring. And running down the walls,” he said.

The Jameses quickly took action, but they’re both elders and Frank is recovering from heart surgery along with other health issues.

“The two of us, we’re not supposed to lift,” he said. “And I’m not supposed to lift period, but I never listen. Anyway, it was a big nightmare.”

They did what they could to move items from the wettest parts of the house into the living room, which remained relatively protected, and they worked to minimize the water damage.

“We had pots and pans. We ran out of pots and pans all over,” he said. “Pretty soon, we had to put raingear on.”

At around 6 a.m., the couple decided it was time to call in the kids and grandkids to help. The family mobilized to move the heavy furniture, and the landlord later sent a crew over to put a tarp over the exposed single-story house.

Several days after the storm, the rooms where the leaks were the worst are cleared out, with nearly everything piled in the living room area. The house is chilly, and there’s a damp smell that’s not strong now, but indicates how bad the leaking was.

“It was horrible,” Frank James said. “I told everybody when they come in, they always usually take their shoes off and they automatically started, I told them, ‘No, you put them on coming in here and take them off going outside.’”

The focus now is on cleanup. Marge James says she’s going to be doing laundry constantly for days.

“Because the walls in the closet in our room, water was coming in to the closets,” she said. “Everything hanging, on the shelves in there: wet.”

At least, clothes can be cleaned. In another room, Frank James says he found some worse damage.

“And then I finally went and checked the office, and here all my electronics were soaked down, every bit of them,” he said. “I’ve got a $2,400 model boat in there, and that was soaked.”

The model boat is a remote-controlled electronic boat. There also was a lot of legal paperwork that had been stored in the office that needs to dry out, and a couple of real boats out in the yard were hit with pieces of the roof as it broke up and scattered.

Right now, Marge and Frank are staying at a local hotel with funding assistance from Ketchikan Indian Community, but they’re looking for a new place to live.

“We’re just trying to get someplace to move into, because we can’t stay in this,” she said. “Like I said to him this morning: Those carpets haven’t hit badly yet, but the smell is going to be atrocious.”

Frank, who has building experience, says it’s going to take several months of work to get the house into a livable condition again. The couple also will need to replace some household items.

Luckily, most of their memorabilia and heritage items are safe, “because most of that kind of thing is in here, as a rule. Like the pictures,” said Marge.

While the couple did not have renters insurance, they said they didn’t need any help, other than a new place to move into. But their daughter, Colleen James-Olsen, says they’re just too proud to accept donations.

James-Olsen says she is working with Tlingit Haida Regional Housing Authority in hopes of getting expedited acceptance for her parents at the Shaan Hidi senior housing facility in Saxman.

Her parents can’t stay with James-Olsen because of pet allergies, so, she says, while they wait to hear from Tlingit Haida, the family is looking for short-term housing options.

The East Coast is still digging out from this weekend’s blizzard. In Washington, the side streets of Capitol Hill look suitable for running the Iditarod. But the U.S. Senate did meet Tuesday morning for 10 minutes. Much of that time was taken up by the Pledge of Allegiance and an unhurried opening prayer from the Senate chaplain.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski was one of two senators to show up. She said she couldn’t help notice that both of them – herself and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine – are female. So was just about everyone else in the chamber, like the clerks and the parliamentarians, who ensure Senate rules are followed. Even the Senate pages on duty, Murkowski said, were an all-female team.

“Perhaps it just speaks to the hardiness of women,” she said, during the opening/closing remarks of the session. You “put your boots on and put your hat on and get out. (You) slog through the mess that is out there.”

She said she spent a good portion of the weekend shoveling and felt stronger for it. She also spent some time posting wintry snapshots on Facebook. One showed her shoveled brick walkway, leading to a snowy Washington street.

Murkowski says many people have asked if these are just normal conditions for an Alaskan. Not this year.

“In fact,” she said on the Senate floor, “we got as much snowfall here in the D.C. metropolitan area as Anchorage, my hometown, has had accumulated over the course of this season. “
Little business was accomplished in the Senate Tuesday. Murkowski postponed consideration of her energy bill until Wednesday when more senators might be present.

High winds knocked down trees and did other damage around Southeast Alaska early Tuesday morning. Wind gusts were recorded at over 50-60 miles an hour at various spots around the region.

One roof blew off a house about 3 miles south of Petersburg. Other trees were blown down near roadways in Juneau, Wrangell and Ketchikan. Residents on Mitkof Island south of Scow Bay were without power for about an hour and a half.

The outage started around 4 a.m. and lasted until 5:30 and was caused by a tree on the power line about 8 miles south of downtown. Petersburg Municipal Power and Light superintendent Joe Nelson said in an email that employees checked the line for damage Tuesday.

Trees were also reported down across Mitkof Highway south of Petersburg. Mike Etcher is highway foreman and airport manager with the Alaska Department of Transportation in Petersburg.

Etcher said there were nine trees down on or across Mitkof Highway in a two-mile stretch starting about 15 miles south of Petersburg. Etcher said the highway was blocked in about six different places early this morning.

“So there was two of us and we cut and sliced and diced up the first three between 5:30 and 6:30 or so,” Etcher said. “But we came to some bigger ones and Power and Light was trying to get to the hydro out there as well and they come back and told us there’s some really big ones and a new pile just down the way so we had to go get the loader and come back and made short work of it, so everything’s good now.”

Mitkof Highway and the road to Papke’s Landing are cleared of downed trees. Etcher also reported a big area of trees knocked over not far from Crystal Lake Hatchery on southern Mitkof. “There’s a new clear cut between the highway and the power lines out there. A whole swath of timber blew down. Like I said it’s really impressive.”

The National Weather Service reports downed trees and power lines in Craig with wind debris throughout Prince of Wales Island.

DOT spokesman Jeremy Woodrow said there were no landslides reported from the storm. He said Alaska Marine Highway ferries are running on schedule in Southeast.

Meanwhile, Power and Light’s Nelson reported that Ketchikan is running on backup diesel generators after a tree fell across the Southeast Alaska Power Agency transmission line near Ward Cove. That damage cut off power from Swan Lake, one of Ketchikan’s hydroelectric sources.

The snow will glow white on the mountains tonight — the Appalachians, that is, from North Carolina through Pennsylvania.

The wind is howling — gusts over 60 miles per hour in some areas, the National Weather Service reports — as this swirling storm moves up the coast.

And if you had any hopes of seeing a play in New York City or flying through D.C., well, let it go.

The winter storm that started dumping snow Friday on the East Coast has entered into its second day. It’s anticipated to carry on through Sunday in some regions.

It has already brought life to a standstill in many parts of the East Coast, including Washington, D.C. and New York City. Roads are inaccessible, public transit is shut down and in New York City, a police-enforced travel ban has gone into effect.

New York was originally predicted to see significantly less snowfall than many other affected areas, but the NWS has revised predicted snow totals up several times since the storm began. Now it’s anticipating 24-30 inches for parts of the city.

The uptick in intensity has thrown the city into high alert. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency for New York City on Saturday, joining multiple numerous states and cities farther south. Bus service in New York was suspended at noon, but transit workers are trying to keep the underground sections of the subway running.

Gov. Cuomo is also instituting a travel ban in the city, which took effect at 2:30 p.m. ET. Drivers out on the road for non-emergencies can now be arrested. Broadway shows on Saturday have all been canceled, and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has strongly urged any restaurants planning to stay open through the storm to shut down and send their employees home.

The D.C. area, where the entire public transit system is shut down all weekend, is expecting 2-3 feet of snow. Philadelphia is expecting up to 2 feet. You can see reported accumulations so far on the NWS site.

And you can watch the storm’s progress thanks to our friends at WNYC.

At least 10,000 flights have been canceled on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, FlightAware reports. United Airlines has canceled all of its Sunday flights at the two major airports in D.C. — and will have only very limited flights at Newark and other New York City airports. The major airports in the New York metro area remain open, but all flights there have been canceled.

The impact of so many cancellations stretches far beyond the storm’s direct reach. On Friday, San Francisco had 15 percent of its flights canceled, and Detroit, Chicago and Orlando saw 10 percent of their flights drop off the boards.

Hundreds of thousands of people have lost power — particularly in the Carolinas, where the storm dropped large quantities of ice as well as snow. In New Jersey alone, WHYY’s Bobby Allyn reports that more than 40,000 people are without power.

Authorities continue to ask residents in storm-affected areas to stay home and stay off the roads. Driving is perilous in many areas: The Virginia Highway Patrol says they responded to nearly a thousand car crashes Friday night. At least 18 people have died due to the weather across the affected area, the AP reports.

In Kentucky, meanwhile, drivers on a stretch of Interstate 75 were stranded overnight as crashes shut down the roadway. The Kentucky State Police said on Twitter late Friday that the Red Cross set up shelters for motorists stranded by the interstate closure.

Early Saturday morning, the police tweeted that police officers and the National Guard were moving cars “one at a time,” and that emergency crews were bringing food, water and fuel to motorists trapped in their cars.

A local TV reporter was stranded on the interstate in her news van, The Associated Press reports. “Every time it looks like there’s light at the end of the tunnel, more accidents and slide-offs are occurring,” Caitlin Centner said, according to the wire service.

One traveling band — stuck on I-75 for 11 1/2 hours, according to their Twitter feed — sang through their woes.

The interstate has now been reopened, an official tells the AP, and no injuries were reported.

Motorists on the Pennsylvania turnpike were also stuck, with some unable to move well into Saturday. The National Guard was called out to provide food and water to those motorists as well.

“Gov. Tom Wolf’s office said the problems in Somerset County began after westbound tractor-trailers were unable to climb a hill,” the AP reports. “As traffic backed up behind them, more trucks also became unable to go up the hill, backing up all vehicles and preventing emergency crews from getting heavy-duty tow trucks to the scene and road crews from being able to clear the snow, officials said.”

The AP spoke to a gymnastics team and a church group stuck on the turnpike, and both reported high spirits. The team noted that being stuck in cramped conditions wasn’t too much of a challenge, since they were gymnasts, after all; the church group, returning to Indiana from an anti-abortion protest in D.C., told the wire service they were on a pilgrimage and “there’s going to be some suffering with that.”

But the Duquesne men’s basketball team, also trapped on the turnpike, was less sanguine. The coach told the AP the players were running out of leftover pizza.

Meanwhile, as the storm is capturing the attention of millions of people, there isn’t exactly agreement on what to call it.

Hurricanes are named by the National Hurricane Center, but there’s no equivalent body for blizzards and snowstorms.

The Weather Channel — which has been naming winter storms since 2012 — dubbed the storm Jonas. (The name comes from a list recommended by a Latin club at a high school in Montana. The students are partial to mythology, and want you to know that if the Weather Channel ever gets to winter storm “Yolo,” that was not their idea.)

But not everybody is a fan of the Weather Channel’s storm-naming: as NPR’s Elise Hu wrote in 2013, it can easily be part of a “hype cycle” that doesn’t serve the public interest. Identifying which winter storm systems are major events is also more subjective than identifying a hurricane.

So the National Weather Center has ignored the use of the name Jonas and is marking its tweets with the rather straightforward hashtag #WinterStorm.

The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang, for its part, asked its readers to vote on the storm’s name. Blizzard of 2016? (Not popular.) Snowtastrophe? (Meh, readers said.) Snownino? (Getting closer…)

The readership went with the Trumpian “Make Winter Great Again,” by a pretty wide margin.

But the Post’s meteorologists overruled democracy. “We’ve thought about it long and hard this morning and although Make Winter Great Again has the most votes — and is certainly hilarious — it doesn’t make for a good name, or a good hashtag,” they wrote.

So they opted for the runner-up, Snowzilla.

Whatever you call it, this storm looks pretty dramatic from space.

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

A pretty good blow passed through Bristol Bay Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, leaving minor damage and some power outages in its wake. Eastside communities had sustained winds around 60 to 70 mph, with gusts over 100 mph, through the overnight hours.

The system intensified as it crossed the Bay toward the northern coastline, the southeast winds arriving with the morning high tide.

The extreme winds passed through the area by early Wednesday afternoon, but gusty southwest winds of 50 to 65 mph were still in the forecast till the evening. The National Weather Service kept a high surf advisory in place until 4 p.m.

How hard did the wind blow during the storm? The National Weather Service tracked the conditions and recorded the highest gusts. KDLG News spoke with NWS Anchorage chief meteorologist Sam Albanese Wednesday morning around 8 a.m. He said the highest wind speeds were recorded at notoriously windy stations.

“Coville, kind of due east of King Salmon, in the Aleutian Range up in Katmai National Park, peaked out at 108 miles an hour overnight. Another one to note was Pfaff Mine, a little higher up in elevation at 2000 feet. They were 101 miles an hour. Then there’s Fourpeaked, which is on the Shelikof side of the mountains. They’re at 1000 feet in elevation, and peaked out at 122 miles an hour.”

Those strong winds from Pfaff Mine were funneling right down through to communities on the south shore of Iliamna Lake. Kokhanok’s Gary Nielsen offered an update Wednesday morning.

“It was a wild night last night,” he said. “Conservative estimate would be 100 to 120 miles an hour out of the east. We didn’t get to bed till three or four I guess, waiting on the roof to go, but it didn’t go, thank goodness. There was a meter base or two ripped off the wall, leaving some houses without power. Several skiffs flipped over, some were damaged. Trees were knocked down. My son was down at his house last night and the top of a tree broke off and just narrowly missed him, about 20 foot of tree.”

As the storm blew west across the Bay, it hit the coastline just as the tide was up.

“We had a pretty good tide this morning, with the winds behind it, cause the winds came out of the south instead of the east,” said Dillingham harbor master Jean Barret, assessing the situation at sunrise. “That pushes everything up into the harbor, and I imagine all the ice has probably turned into slush.”

Around 10 a.m. several containers at the dock were blown over, and the City asked residents to steer clear of the area. Crews were working to set those up right Tuesday morning.

“I would imagine they’re all empty containers because we don’t keep anything in them in the wintertime,” said Barrett, not expecting much damage.

But in Togiak, the winds and surge of water and ice have wreaked havoc on the seawall. City administrator Darryl Thompson said while some of the problems began during last year’s similarly warm winter, this storm and the one on Christmas Day have caused major new damage.

“For about a thousand feet of our seawall, on the north end of town, the beach has eroded away and the gravel is gone. One tide, in one storm at 70 knots, took out 3 feet of gravel from in front of the seawall. Basically, it is starting to collapse,” he said.

Thompson was filling out state forms to declare a disaster situation and said the community is not safe without a functioning seawall. Repairing it will be costly.

“I’m thinking right now $2 million would be a start,” he said. “The gravel has moved from the north half of the village to the south half, and it’s buried the south seawall. That we can reclaim by bulldozing out that material and exposing the base again. But the beach that used to be on the north side of the village is basically gone. This seawall has been here 30 years, and it’s held up really well, and we were pretty proud of it.”

Power was out Wednesday morning and utilities were running on backup generators. School buses were pre-positioned to evacuate residents to higher ground if necessary. The tide Wednesday evening will be larger, and Togiak is keeping emergency resources ready.

Other communities reported minor damage with a few windows out, trees down, parts of roofing pulled off, and fluctuating power.

William Wells lives and works at what may be the nation’s most remote weather station. It’s 300 miles off the west coast of Alaska (and 500 miles off the east coast of Siberia) in the Bering Sea. Even by St. Paul Island standards, his station is remote: it’s off by itself, a few miles away from the village of 400 people who call St. Paul home.

Each afternoon, he walks from his office into a two-story-tall garage to fill up a six-foot-wide balloon with hydrogen gas.

“You wouldn’t be able to use your equipment while I would be inflating,” Wells says afterward. “We would have to do this interview outside in the wind because of the risk of static electricity that would create a potential explosion hazard.”

“But we’re not under threat right now because it’s contained safely within that latex,” he assures me.

Helium would be safer but more expensive, especially with shipping to the middle of the Bering Sea. So the St. Paul National Weather Service station generates its own hydrogen on-site.

Once the big latex balloon is inflated, Wells takes a string and ties a small gadget known as a “radiosonde” to the balloon.

“It tracks the temperature, relative humidity, and wind speed and wind direction as it goes up through the atmosphere,” Wells says.

Tundra sprinter

He pulls on a heavy chain to open the double-tall garage door. Then he grabs the balloon’s string in one hand and checks his watch with the other. When the clock strikes three, he sprints out the door in a mad dash: across a patch of tundra toward the gravel road in front of the station.

As the balloon above him clears the high garage door, a 30-knot wind whips it hard to the east. The wind that strafes low, treeless St. Paul Island pummels the balloon into a shape basically like a 3-D comma.

Wells needs to get far enough away from the weather station’s buildings that the wind doesn’t plow the balloon or its electronics into the side of one of them.

Once he reaches the road, he releases the balloon, and it shoots away. In this wind, the balloon takes off more like an airplane than a balloon.

Wells returns to the garage and quickly closes it up.

“Now, I’m going to apologize, but I’m going to take off almost at a full-bore sprint,” he says before doing just that.

He sprints the 100 yards back to his office to make sure the radiosonde is transmitting data in real time. It is. No need for a second launch today.

Hundreds of Balloons

It’s a daily routine for Wells. For the balloon, it’s a one-time affair. As it rises 20 miles into the sky, it swells to about 40 feet in diameter. Then it bursts and returns to Earth as debris, most likely somewhere in the Bering Sea. But not before it has sent back valuable data.

“We are such a remote location,” Wells says, “Our data is pretty precious.”

That data gets used within the hour in the 4 p.m. NOAA weather forecasts that mariners and others rely on in the Bering Sea and beyond

Twice a day, like clockwork, balloons are released from hundreds of locations around the world at noon and midnight Universal Time (3 p.m. and 3 a.m. Alaska Daylight Time). Before they burst in the upper atmosphere, they help weather forecasters pinpoint what’s going on overhead.

In a report on the impacts of released balloons, marine biologist Jan van Franeker with Wageningen University in the Netherlands says, even if made of natural latex, they are a danger to wildlife, especially seabirds. He says remains of weather balloons can be found regularly on European beaches.

“The risk of wildlife suffering or dying from balloons may be best balanced against usefulness or necessity of balloons released,” van Franeker writes. “Latex weather balloons are an essential element for reliable weather forecasts to the extent that human life may be affected. But the short joy of a mass of party balloons disappearing into the sky?”

Each National Weather Service radiosonde includes a self-addressed envelope encouraging anyone who finds it to mail the gadget back for reuse.

A Century in St. Paul

The St. Paul weather station has been collecting data since 1915. It’s been successfully sending balloons into the sky, in winds up to 50 miles per hour, since 1948.

Wells says he’s always loved the weather, especially the meat and potatoes of gathering the raw information needed to make a forecast.

“It takes a lot of skill and hardiness to do it, and I’m proud to do it,” he says.

The National Weather Service is testing an automatic balloon-launching device at its station in Kodiak in November. Someday, human launchers like Wells could be replaced by machines at the 13 weather stations in Alaska and those across the country.

Far From Home

For now, Wells is a continent–and 300 miles of Bering Sea–away from his native North Carolina, but he doesn’t mind.

“I feel privileged to be doing this,” he says. “I’d always wanted to work for the weather service and now I am working for the weather service, and I couldn’t be happier.”

Some St. Paul residents dislike it when their home is described as “the middle of nowhere.” And in some ways, the Pribilof Islands are centrally located: St. Paul is home to the world’s largest Aleut community; Trident Seafoods claims to run the world’s largest crab-processing plant there. Nearly half of all seafood harvested in the United States is hauled up from the Bering Sea.

Still, travel to St. Paul from almost anywhere else (it’s a three-hour, thrice-weekly flight from Anchorage on planes so small they ask you what you weigh before assigning you a seat), and you realize that St. Paul is on the distant outer perimeter of the Last Frontier.

Wells says his quiet life on the outskirts of St. Paul, on the outskirts of America, is lacking in some creature comforts, but it’s been good for him.

“I lost 25 pounds after moving up here because I didn’t have the temptations of fast-food restaurants about me,” he says.

It’s a different career path than his classmates who get dressed up and made up and sweep their arms in front of maps on TV news. Jobs like his make their forecasts possible.

“They can have the TV and the radio,” Wells says. “I’ll stick with this.”