Health

It’s been four months since an ammonia spill on a processing vessel shut down parts of Unalaska. Now, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has wrapped up their investigation into the accident.

The result: more than $55,000 in fines – and some valuable lessons for emergency responders.

This July, the Seattle-based processing vessel Excellence was on its way to Unalaska when the crew discovered a tiny leak in their ammonia line. They tried to empty it out, and called Alpha Welding to patch the hole.

According to Scott Ketcham, OSHA’s Anchorage area director, that’s where the trouble started.

“The ammonia line would have been, or should have been, evacuated,” says Ketcham. “In this case, the valve was not locked out, and they cut into a live line.”

That oversight is one of five worker safety violations that OSHA found on the Excellence. All five were rated “serious,” and one was a repeat offense. That added up to $50,000 in fines for the seafood company that owns the vessel.

In all, two welders and a crew member from the Excellence were exposed to a cloud of ammonia. They were sent to the hospital, where one welder was treated for serious lung damage. The rest of the ship’s crew was evacuated. Roads around the Kloosterboer cold storage dock, where the Excellence was tied up, had to be shut down.

Abner Hoage had been Unalaska’s fire chief for just two weeks when the spill happened. He was fresh out of the Air Force, and had just moved to town from Idaho. While he was up for a challenge, he didn’t know what kind of assistance he could expect.

Fortunately, it didn’t take long for local processors to offer help.

“Westward provided personnel to participate in the command structure. They had a refrigeration expert who was out there a lot,” Hoage says. “UniSea was down there with their hazmat team and personnel. Alyeska had people down there with equipment and personnel.”

The plants also offered to house the displaced crew of 130 people for more than a week while the Excellence was fixed. In a way, Hoage says, the accident had its upsides.

“I got to meet people and develop relationships with the industry and the other resources in the community that may have taken me a year to otherwise meet,” says Hoage.

Hoage says he’s also writing up agreements with the processors that lay out their response capabilities so the city is prepared for future emergencies.

In the wake of the ammonia leak, the city also learned it can call on Anchorage’s fire department. That agency has said they’re willing to charter a plane or use military aircraft to get to Unalaska in the case of a big emergency.

For now, OSHA’s case against the Excellence is still open. Anchorage-area director Scott Ketcham says the vessel’s owner has been extremely cooperative. Premier Pacific Seafoods has planned a serious overhaul of their safety system, which he says helped them get their fines reduced from $65,000 to $50,000.

“Yes, there was some reductions in return for good faith,” Ketcham says. “But they gave us some really good corrections for these things, happening in the future. And I feel very comfortable with the other contractor.”

By “other contractor,” he means Alpha Welding. OSHA found that they didn’t have the right permits or properly-fitted safety equipment when they took on the Excellence welding job.

Their fine was only $4,000, but they’ve spent five times that amount on new safety programs and permits. Going forward, Alpha Welding has a new rule when working on refrigeration systems. They won’t make the first cut into a pipe that could potentially contain ammonia. Instead, they’ll leave that up to the ship’s crew.

Move over chicken nuggets, smoked salmon is now on the menu at some Juneau schools.

This past Wednesday, Juneau schools participated in Alaska Local Food Day. The event is intended to celebrate “local, healthy, affordable and sustainable foods,” according to a press release.

For breakfast, students had barley cereal from Delta Junction, followed by a lunch of baked Coho salmon from Taku Smokeries with carrot and cabbage coleslaw from the Mat-Su valley.

Alaska Local Food day is part of the month long National Farm to School Month and falls on National Food Day.

The local food is part of a long term plan to get more local foods on the trays of Juneau students, according to the release. Funding from the Alaska Department of Commerce, Community and Economic Development is going towards more of the locally produced food during the 2012-2013 school year.

This week is the 94th anniversary of the sinking of the Princess Sophia passenger ship in Lynn Canal, which claimed the lives of about 350 people.

For more than 20 years, Oct. 25^th has been marked by prayers at the Evergreen Cemetery graves of two passengers, Walter and Francis Harper, who perished in the disaster.

Every year, the Rev. Mark Boesser, Archdeacon for the Episcopal Church in Southeast Alaska, and Wilson Valentine, Parish Chaplin at Juneau’s Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, visit the gravesites of the couple. The Harpers were newlyweds when they booked their passage on the Canadian Pacific Railway ship from Skagway.

Valentine says Walter Harper is important to the history of the Episcopal Church in Alaska.

“He was a Native person that was a translator for Archdeacon Hudson Stuck, in the early 20^th Century.  He also climbed Denali with Archdeacon Stuck in 1913, the first ascent of that mountain.  And Walter was actually the first human being to set foot on the summit,” he says.

The Princess Sophia left Skagway on Oct. 23, 1918, bound for Seattle, with stops along the way in Alaskan and Canadian ports.  She was the last ship of the season.  Within four hours, however, the ship grounded on Vanderbilt Reef in Lynn Canal, in blinding snow and strong winds.

While distress calls were heard, the storm intensified, making rescue attempts unsafe. Captain Leonard Locke apparently told rescue boats to wait out the storm for their own safety.

Three days after it grounded, the Princess Sophia sank with no time to get anyone off the ship.

Valentine is among a group of Juneau residents who are beginning to plan for a 100^th commemoration of the sinking of the ship.

 

 

 

The lifelong effects of childhood trauma have been the subject of talks among the 350-some participants in the Alaska Child Maltreatment Conference held in Anchorage this week, and hosted by the Alaska Children’s Alliance.

Adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs, such as abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction caused by substance abuse, for instance, or domestic violence … significantly affect adult behavior, social health and physical health. That’s according to Dr. Rob Anda, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the 1990s, he and Dr. Vincent Felletti, of Kaiser Permanente, surveyed 17,000 people about ACES and about their health. Anda says the results show the higher the number of ACEs, the more problems later in life:

Those included behaviors that are risk factors for major illness, smoking and alcohol and drug abuse. We see social problems, difficulty maintaining relationships keeping families together. The risk of growing up and being a victim of violence as an adult. And even things like being able to do your job, performing well on the job, being able to get to your job, and show up to your job and do your job well.

Anda says high ACEs scores are also linked to leading causes of death, such as heart disease, cancer, and diseases of the lungs, liver and immune system.

He says the people surveyed were well educated, and mostly middle class.

But two thirds of them had at least one adverse childhood experience, and 16% had four or more ACEs, indicating, he says, adversity is common and has no social or economic boundaries.

Gretchen Schmeltzer, PhD, is a licensed psychologist from Massachusetts.

She says adverse childhood experiences are widespread among Alaska Natives of at least one generation:

“We’ve seen in the Alaska Native communities, is the boarding schools. People weren’t allowed to be with their parents and were abused there.”

Schmeltzer says people who experience childhood trauma have difficulty attaching to others and forming healthy relationships, and in managing their emotions,  she says those traits are passed on from generation to generation:

[quote]”The generation that’s experienced trauma the impact on them is basically they have to shut down emotionally to survive the trauma and they lose trust in relationships and then it’s very difficult to parent and then their children grow up not knowing how to do those two things. And those two things are what help us manage stress and help us get along in the world and as we have fewer and fewer of those skills, it becomes harder and harder to cope.”[/quote]

Anda says he’s encouraged by the participation of a range of professionals in the conference, which includes social workers, law enforcement officers, counselors, teachers, nurses, and others who work with children.

Dr. Ward Hurlbert, chief medical officer and Public Health director in the state department of health and human services agrees a collaborative effort is needed. He says the state has programs to teach and support good parenting, but a broader change is needed:

[quote]”Our children are fragile and we do them great harm when we don’t place enough priority on bringing a child into this world, that this is a blessing and a new living being that is very fragile, and that we need to take the responsibility of raising that child more seriously than we do.”[/quote]

Hurlbert says the state is including questions about adverse childhood experiences in a behavioral risk survey planned for next year.

Bartlett Regional Hospital is severing its longstanding ties with Quorum Health Resources.

The Tennessee-based company currently provides discounted supply purchases and management consulting to Juneau’s city-owned hospital. For more than two decades Quorum also employed Bartlett’s chief executive and chief financial officers.

The hospital board of directors decided last year to hire its own management team, and on Tuesday members voted unanimously to terminate Bartlett’s three-year consulting contract with Quorum, which took effect January 31^st.

Board President Bob Storer was travelling Wednesday and unavailable to comment. But hospital CEO Chris Harff says administrators no longer need those consulting services.

“We haven’t really used them since I’ve been here,” said Harff, who joined Bartlett in mid-August. “And we kind of have what we need to move forward, and don’t need additional services and we can always go to the market and get those services if needed.”

Harff says that’s exactly what the hospital will do to get a new supply purchasing deal.

“We already have a boilerplate (request for proposals) ready to go out,” she says. “I don’t expect that to take very long at all.”

She says the contract with Quorum can be terminated with 60 day notice, and Bartlett can keep using its current purchasing agreement for three months after that.

Terms of the contract, approved by the hospital board and Juneau Assembly less than a year ago, call for Bartlett to pay Quorum $380,000 a year.

Officials with Quorum could not be reached for comment.

Bartlett is a city enterprise fund that runs on patient fees. The hospital board of directors is appointed by the Juneau Assembly.

It’s been more than a year since Juneau’s Bartlett Regional Hospital has purchased drugs from the Massachusetts facility associated with a deadly outbreak of fungal meningitis.

The city-owned hospital put out a statement Friday after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned earlier this week that all injectable drugs from the New England Compounding Center produced after May 21st of this year are of “significant concern.”

Some pharmacies in Alaska have received drugs from the center since then, according to the state Department of Health and Social Services. But Bartlett is not among them.

Hospital Spokesman Jim Strader says Cardinal Health is the primary drug supplier for Bartlett’s pharmacy.

The fungal meningitis outbreak is now believed to be responsible for 21 deaths and 271 infections in 16 states. The cause has been determined to be contaminated steroid shots produced by the Massachusetts pharmacy. The FDA issued its warning about other injectable drugs out of “an abundance of caution.”

Meningitis is an infection of membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. Symptoms include fever, chills, nausea, vomiting, stiff neck, severe headache, sensitivity to light, and changes in mental status.