Military

The U.S. Navy recently demonstrated their expertise during a training exercise in Juneau.

Sailors launched submersibles that ran back and forth across the downtown harbor, making maps and looking for objects that were unusual or out of place. And, in the absence of real explosives, they practiced identifying some of the things they found at the bottom of Gastineau Channel like tires, crab pots and logs.

One Navy unit tested unmanned underwater vehicles equipped with side-scan sonar. These look like torpedos and would partially submerge and run back and forth across the downtown harbor like a batch of lawnmowers as they looked for objects that were unusual or out of place.

Another Navy unit created detailed maps of the ocean bottom.

A third Navy unit of divers would use remotely operated vehicles to identify unusual objects and remove any underwater explosives.

The U.S. Navy explosive ordinance disposal group spent two weeks in Juneau in late February and early March 2020 as part of Arctic Edge 2020 exercises.

The U.S. Navy is holding a training exercise in Gastineau Channel on Saturday, Feb. 29.

They’ll be simulating the search and disposal of underwater explosives. Lt. Kara Handley of the U.S. Navy said no real explosives will be used.

The sailors will split up into groups. One group will use unmanned underwater vehicles to map Gastineau Channel and search for mines. Another group will be the underwater bomb squad. Those sailors will disable or destroy the mines using divers and underwater robots.

Handley said, in the past, Navy sailors have cleared real mines in harbors during the Korean war and defused mines in the Middle East.

Saturday’s training exercise is part of Arctic Edge 2020, a campaign intended to test how the military can operate in cold weather environments. As part of Arctic Edge, sailors were in Adak last year helping update local nautical charts after discovering some shipwreck sites.

Gastineau Channel will remain open to marine traffic during the exercise.

The supply chain that ensures Alaska’s schools serve nutritious food has broken down in some communities that rely on the Alaska Marine Highway System.

Recently, one school district unsuccessfully appealed to the Coast Guard to help deliver foods from the U.S. Department of Agriculture that had been stuck in Juneau.

Some of Alaska’s school cafeteria food is supplied by the USDA to ensure minimum nutrition standards. The federal government only brings it as far as Seattle.

From there, the state of Alaska transports it to more than a dozen hubs across the state.

“Those 13 locations are based on population centers where we have more students,” said Jo Dawson, the child nutrition program manager for the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development.

Once the federally-supplied food reaches those 13 drop points in Alaska, schools in remote areas of the state transport it the rest of the way to their communities.

In Southeast Alaska, some schools have used the Alaska Marine Highway System to transport the food from Juneau.

The problem for those schools is that regional service has been shut down since late January. Minimal service isn’t expected to return until next month.

“Most of the districts haven’t been affected,” said Dawson. “We’ve had two, which are Chatham (School District) and Hoonah (City Schools), that have been the most affected because they did use the ferry system, not only for the USDA foods, but for their regular commercial foods as well.”

The Chatham School District includes schools in the remote communities of Angoon, Gustavus and Klukwan.

Chatham School District Superintendent Bruce Houck told KHNS that USDA foods bound for Angoon were stuck in a warehouse in Juneau for weeks. In an email, he said the school reached out to the Coast Guard last month, requesting they deliver those goods to Angoon.

Chief Petty Officer Mathew Schofield, a Coast Guard spokesperson based in Juneau, said Angoon’s request was denied.

“If we were to deliver things based on a humanitarian need, it’s typically because there would be no commercial avenues that are available. In this particular case, the Coast Guard has been in direct contact with the school district and staff there and essentially pointed them to different resources that are available commercially,” Schofield said.

Merchants on the ground say it’s not so easy.

Shayne Thompson would know. He runs Angoon Trading Co., the main store in town. Right now, Angoon is receiving goods by seaplane — at 85 cents a pound. Thompson has also partnered with other residents to charter landing craft to make deliveries.

“We don’t have a proper barge landing here in Angoon, so we have opted to enlist landing craft when we have a load that is big enough to bring over, which since October has been about every three weeks,” Thompson said.

But it hasn’t been consistent. That means it’s hard to keep perishables stocked.

“Fresh produce items and stuff that we would normally replenish every week we run out of, and our dairy and that sort of thing we run out of too,” Thompson said.

Chatham School District officials said they had to fly fresh produce to Angoon’s school due to the shortage of food for their lunch program.

The ferry Tazlina is expected to resume runs to Angoon and Hoonah in March. That should bring some relief to both the schools and merchants.

In the meantime, food drives organized in Juneau and Sitka are sending donations to the villages cut off by the shutdown of the Alaska Marine Highway System.

 

An Alaska state representative wants the federal government to name one of its new polar icebreakers the Polar Bear.

Chris Tuck, an Anchorage Democrat, introduced a formal resolution Monday calling on U.S. Coast Guard to use the name, which would honor the historic Revenue Cutter Bear. That’s a renowned ship that served in both world wars and once spared hundreds of iced-in whalers from starvation when their vessels became marooned off Alaska’s northern coast.

One of the reasons Tuck knows the history is because he once claimed a picture of the original Bear when it was being removed from the Capitol’s legislators-only cafeteria.

“I have the thing hanging in my office all this time. So the Bear stares at me,” Tuck said. “So it was knowing that we were having some new icebreakers on the way that I thought, ‘You know what? What better way of honoring the Bear?’” he said.

The Coast Guard is building three new polar security cutters — their term for heavy icebreakers. In April, the federal government awarded a $750 million contract for the first one’s construction to a shipyard in Mississippi.

The Coast Guard’s current icebreaking fleet consists of two vessels: a heavy icebreaker called the Polar Star and a medium icebreaker called the Healy. There’s a second heavy icebreaker called the Polar Sea, but both it and the Polar Star were built in the 1970s and are well beyond their expected lifespans — the Polar Sea broke down in 2010 and has since been used for spare parts.

The U.S. has begun playing catch-up to Arctic rivals that have far bigger icebreaking fleets. Russia, for example, has at least 46, several of which are nuclear powered. Finland has 10 and Canada has seven.

Correction: The Healy came online in the 1990s, not the 1970s, as this story initially said.

 

In her annual address to a joint session of the Legislature Tuesday, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski told lawmakers that the state should do more to help Alaskans get REAL IDs.

“This is going to take state resources, in order to get out to these communities,” she said. “And in fairness, it’s not something that we can just pass the plate and ask for it to be funded. We’ve just got to put the resources towards it so that people can move.”

Rural lawmakers have said the state should put more money toward helping residents get the federally-required IDs by the Oct. 1 deadline. State officials asked in December for donations to bring state workers to villages to make REAL IDs. But the program has been affected by technical problems.

In a press conference after the speech, Murkowski told reporters she’s concerned about President Donald Trump directing money from military procurement and the National Guard to build the wall along the border with Mexico. She said Congress controls the federal purse strings under the U.S. Constitution.

“We as the congressional branch have our powers under Article I,” she said. “And we will exercise them.”

Murkowski said in the speech that the Trump impeachment trial may have been the most deeply partisan experience of her career. She was asked by a reporter whether she sees parallels with the recall campaign against Gov. Mike Dunleavy. Murkowski said she sees Alaska as less partisan than Washington, D.C.

“It seems to me that Alaskans are just so much more practical and pragmatic about what it is we are dealing with that really matters,” she said. “And I hope that we’re able to stay that way. I hope that we don’t let this divide us.”

Murkowski also said federal highway funding legislation will be useful as the state plans for the future of the Alaska Marine Highway System.

---

Watch the latest legislative coverage from Gavel Alaska.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski was one of eight Republicans who crossed the aisle to pass a resolution Thursday that restricts President Donald Trump’s ability to attack Iran.

The Senate’s Iran war powers resolution would require Trump to get the permission of Congress before launching a military action, unless the action was in defense of “imminent attack.”

Murkowski, in a written statement, said the resolution doesn’t restrict Trump’s ability to defend U.S. troops. The president still has substantial powers, Murkowski said, but the Constitution gives Congress the authority to declare war.

Sen. Dan Sullivan voted with most Republicans against the resolution.

“He strongly opposes any attempt to undermine the President’s lawful authority as Commander in Chief to protect American troops and installations, and preserve America’s security interests in the region,” Sullivan’s spokesperson said by email.

The resolution passed the Senate 55-45. That’s not a large enough margin to overturn a presidential veto.