Weather

It’s been a dry summer for Kodiak, which has left the Monashka reservoir on Kodiak Island low.

According to Rick Thoman, the climate science and services manager for the Alaska region of the National Weather Service, it’s one of the driest seasons in Kodiak history.

“Kodiak since June 1 has received just over 10 inches of rain. That’s just about half of normal for that time and is the second lowest of record … the only reliable warm kind of time of year was 1941 when there was less than 8 inches of rain through June through September,” Thoman said.

Thoman says areas of Southcentral Alaska were dry during part of the summer but have rebounded in September. In fact, he says this month is Anchorage’s fourth wettest September. But Kodiak remains dry.

Kodiak city public works director Mark Kozak says the lack of snowfall last winter has also contributed to the lowered reservoir. He says Kodiak has consumed a little over half its capacity — although that capacity is still more than it was in the early 2000s.

“In 2003, we raised the Monashka reservoir and at that time, it pretty much doubled our capacity, so we’re now slightly below the level of the old reservoir, which the city used from 1982 to 2003, and we’re 3 feet below that old reservoir if it were full,” Kozak said.

Kozak says both the community at large and its seafood processors rely on the Monashka reservoir as a water source.

“When the processors aren’t using water, our daily consumption is about 2 million gallons a day, but when they’re processing here prior to the middle of last week, as a community we were averaging between 7.7 and 8.3 million a day,” Kozak said.

He says at a meeting Friday, the processors agreed to limit their water usage where they can.

“They’ll do all the careful monitoring of excess water usage and turn things off and that, and what we really want to be able to do is support the processing industry so that everybody’s still working and the fishermen are working and the process workers,” Kozak said.

The Pollock season opens Oct. 1 and processors are in transition at this point, which also affects the water use. Kozak says they’ll have a better idea of what changes processors have been able to make by the end of the week when they reach full production.

 

The National Weather Service has issued a flood watch for Juneau and northern Admiralty Island.

“This is a wet one,” said weather forecaster Kimberly Vaughan.

The service is forecasting up to 6 inches of rain by late Tuesday night, which could cause rapid rises on rivers and streams. With saturated soil and high winds in some areas, there is also risk of mudslides.

“This weather is coming in from the Pacific, and it’s drifting in from the west Gulf of Alaska. And we’ve got these pulses that are going through today, and then the main system is still out in the west gulf right now,” Vaughn said.

Additional 2-6″ through Tue night. Rivers/streams will continue to rise with potential flooding by Tue morning #akwx pic.twitter.com/f1uOrCkEIC

— NWS Juneau (@NWSJuneau) September 28, 2015

Communities affected include Skagway, Haines, Gustavus, Hoonah, Elfin Cove, Pelican, Sitka, Port Alexander and Angoon.

The watch is in effect through late Tuesday night.

Fairbanks got its first major snowfall of the season Friday. As usual, drivers are counting on the state to plow and sand highways and some side roads, but budget cuts mean reduced maintenance. The downsized operation is expected to be tested this winter.

Department of Transportation Northern region spokeswoman Meadow Bailey says maintenance staff overtime has been eliminated, and that will felt when there’s a major winter weather event.

Bailey says back up plow and sanding vehicles will no longer be available. High volume state roads will continue to be the top maintenance priority, but she adds it will take longer for crews to get to less trafficked outlying state roads.

Just as it was getting dark Saturday evening, Akiak resident and dog musher Mike Williams Sr. stepped outside to see his kennel falling into the Kuskokwim River and seven of his 60 sled dogs being pulled along with it.

The dogs were hanging by their chains, their bodies dangling over the eroding banks.

“They were beginning to choke,” Williams says, “but they’re alive, they’re okay now. [We] got them just in time.”

A relative stepped outside to check on Williams’ 60 dogs when he realized something wasn’t right.

The lot was falling into the riverbank, and quickly.

“This is about the most I’ve seen in recent times in Akiak,” Williams said.

He was able to rescue and relocate all of his sled dogs, but lost a refrigerator that stored dog food. Over the next few hours he also lost about 50 feet of land.

“These are tough times for all of us, and hopefully a lot of erosion projects will be funded to help fix all of this stuff,” he says.

What Williams experienced is called mass erosion.

Erosions is common along the Kuskokwim, especially in an era of climate change. But in Akiak, erosion commonly occurs during breakup season when the river flows faster, not in late September.

Chris Maio, an Assistant Professor of Geology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, studies coastal geography and says Saturday’s erosion is abnormal.

“I certainly think that is what I’d categorize as an extreme erosional event,” Maio said.

Maio says the event is a result of three elements: the river’s natural composition, warmer weather and high rainfall.

The sediment in communities along the Kuskokwim is composed primarily of silt, a fine gradient, and it’s held together by permafrost.

When the temperatures rise, the permafrost melts, weakening the riverbanks.  When a heavy rain comes, it can tear the land away.

Williams says it had been raining a lot before the mass erosion, raising the river, but he says the weather Saturday night wasn’t particularly windy or intense.

In 2009, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers conducted an erosion assessment of almost 200 Alaskan communities.

According to the assessment, Akiak is losing about an acre of land a year, and the village’s communications hub will be lost within 30 years to erosion.

Researchers concluded that potential damage could cost more than $18 million.

Akiak City Administrator Ivan Ivan says the city has developed a mitigation plan, and recently applied for a disaster relief grant through FEMA. If awarded, the grant will help relocate about nine homes that are close to the river.

Ivan says they’re still waiting to hear back.

This past weekend, a Juneau Preparedness Expo gave the public a variety of information on how to cope in an emergency. One lecture more relevant than ever was on mudslides and landslides–just weeks after Sitka’s deadly disaster.

Joel Curtis from the National Weather Service told a small but captive audience about the mechanics of a slide.

He’s witnessed the damage firsthand. A couple of weeks ago he was on an ordinary business trip in Sitka, where he had been helping out with a diesel spill.

“And I get another message. Could you please come to the firehall immediately. One of the things we had talked about in the forecast the day before was some heavy rain combined with some wind,” he said.

Curtis rushed to the fire station and that’s when they told him.

“‘Joel, we need you to be the incident meteorologist on this. We just had a mudslide and three people are missing.’ It was terribly emotional, at least to me.”

The mudslide claimed the lives of three people. An intensive search uncovered the bodies of brothers Elmer and Ulises Diaz, who had been painting a house in the area. It took longer to find the third person: building inspector, William Stortz.

For Curtis, that really hit home.

“Knowing that this much beloved individual was missing was really, really tough,” he said. “But at the same time you just have to set that aside and go to work and do the things that you do to contribute to the recovery operation.”

Curtis helped by monitoring the weather, and Stortz’s body was located before more rain fell.

He says there are some differences between the conditions in Sitka and Juneau. For instance, Sitka gets the brunt of oceanic weather. Juneau has taller mountains to the East. But could the same thing happen here? 

Tom Mattice, the city’s emergency coordinator, said it already has. One of Juneau’s most destructive slides occurred in 1936, covering South Franklin Street and killing 15.

Although there’s little anyone can do to prevent it, Mattice said there are steps people can take to protect themselves–like have an evacuation route. Five years ago, Centennial Hall was used as a safe space when a slide hit Gastineau Avenue.

“If you live in an area that’s a mass wasting zone, an avalanche zone, a mudslide zone. On days with high wind, on days on high precip, it’s a good idea to go somewhere else,” Mattice said.

Joel Curtis agrees. He said since Southeast is a temperate rainforest, landslides are inevitable.

“They’re hazards and they’re big and they’re natural and there’s a lot of force in them. I think being prepared is the answer.”

Curtis says for him, that’s having an emergency bag packed and being able to evacuate with his dog and cat.

Thick fog enveloped the mountains as about 75 people from Anchorage and the Mat-Su Valley attended workshops and panels on climate and faith.

“Any person who has a devotion to God in any form should think of the Earth as a creation that needs to be protected, needs to be cared for in a proper way,” said panelist Orthodox Bishop David Mahaffey. “So as a human being who knows and loves a creator God, I feel it’s my role to be involved in these things.”

The Bishop said he incorporates protection of the environment in his daily life and sacraments. For him and many of the other speakers at the conference, faith and environmental protection are not just linked; they are inextricably tied together.

And for some leaders, like Dr. Genmyo Zeedyk of the Anchorage Zen Community, that means speaking up about climate change.

A 2014 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute shows that the more people hear about climate change from their religious leaders, the more likely they are to believe in it.

But Presbyterian Reverend Dr. Curt Karns said that doesn’t mean climate change is an easy conversation to have with congregations in oil-dependent Alaska.

“In our churches, where we all want to be nice to each other, we often try to dance around important topics. But you need then the prophets who say you’ve got to take a look at this. What we’ve found is that it’s hard to get a congregation up and moving. But there are few folks who get the vision so we try to connect them across congregations.”

The 2014 survey shows that Hispanic Catholics in the United States are the most likely religious group to be concerned about climate change. White Evangelical Protestants are the least likely. The nation as a whole is split 50-50.

Jamboree attendee Cyrus Hicks says the division among Christians may be because of different interpretations of scripture.

“I think there’s a huge emphasis on personal salvation and how temporary this life is. A lot of times you hear we are supposed to be ‘in’ the world but not ‘of’ it. And there are scriptures that say not to love the ways of the world. But then you have other scriptures that say God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.”

But for Bishop David, ultimately that doesn’t matter. “All of us have an obligation to care for the environment. It doesn’t matter what your faith is or your background is. We were put here as the caretakers, the stewards of this. We will answer for what we do or don’t do for the environment.”

The event was hosted by the InterFaith Earth Care Action Network.