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Support for Alaska Public Media on Demand.
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Comes from Siri, an Alaska Native corporation.
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With operations and investments spanning five continents, 45 states and two US territories. I've had 170 mile an hour winds.
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And I know what it's like.
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It is scary. But stay calm, make reasonable decisions.
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As one storm fades away, western Alaska communities brace for another. From Alaska Public Media, this is statewide news on Alaska News nightly for Friday, October 10th. Good evening. I'm Casey Grove. Also tonight, Alaska's education department backtracks on a controversial proposal around school funding due to the state.
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I think just the stress about school funding, a lot of trust isn't there? The department wants to earn that trust.
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Back those stories and more tonight on Alaska News Nightly. Forecasters are warning of high winds and possible flooding from the remnants of a typhoon on track to hit western Alaska this weekend. Ex typhoon Ha Long passed by Japan earlier this week and is on its way into the Aleutians and the Bering Sea. The storm is bringing with it wind that could reach as high as 80 mph in some places and the potential for flooding and coastal erosion. That's according to the National Weather Service which has issued weather warnings or watches along most of Alaska's west and northwest coast from the Kuskokwim Delta all the way north to utgiavik. Rick Thoman, a climatologist with the Alaska center for Climate Assessment and Preparedness, is watching ex typhoon HA Long closely. He says there's some uncertainty about exactly where the storm will hit Alaska and some big questions about its impacts.
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It looks like that the impacts will start to be felt on the on Alaska lands first in the Pribilofs and then Saturday later in the day, Saturday evening looking for the YK Delta especially, but probably not exclusively north of Nunavac island with as very strong south winds blow across that area. Places that have a southern exposure, places like Hooper Bay are really in the sights for the first large scale impacts of this. After that, the storm continues to move north, crosses St. Lawrence island during the day Sunday and at that point very strong winds into the southern Seward Peninsula coast, push of high water into the coast into Norton Sound. That's going to be really the the worst time for those areas in the Bering Strait region.
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And what can people expect? I guess, you know, especially in like you mentioned Hooper Bay and like the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta getting hit starting on Saturday. It sounds like what kind of wind and precipitation do you expect?
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Well, that is going to be something that's maybe somewhat different than Some coastal flood producing storms that we've had, of course they all bring lots of wind. But because this storm looks to be particularly intense, there is going to be in all probability much stronger winds on land than some storms that are producing coastal flooding. By having this very long fetch of strong winds across the ocean here, we're going to see very strong winds on land. Even in coastal communities it's entirely possible that we will see gusts to 60 to 70 miles an hour, sustained winds, 40, maybe 50 miles an hour in places that don't typically get winds quite that strong.
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And then even, you know, farther to the north up the coast. You mentioned Norton Sound, which of course got hit by a storm early this week. Kotzbu, you know, saw pretty widespread flooding there. Is the concern for that region more about, you know, more flooding there?
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Absolutely. Threat of more flooding. It certainly looks like for the Norton Sound communities that water levels will be higher in this storm than they were earlier this week. Particularly the areas from Nome eastward look to be really potential for very, very high water levels, significant coastal flooding. Do want to stress though very difficult forecast situation in that slight shifts in the storm track will make potentially a big difference in just how much water gets shoved into the coast at any given place. So you know, often it wouldn't make a lot of difference to the forecast. But here if the low say winds up passing over Western St. Lawrence island versus Eastern St. Lawrence island, that is going to mean very different outcomes for some communities on the Norton Sound coast.
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So there was the storm that flooded Kotzebue this week. There's this ex typhoon Ha long hitting this weekend. And then did I see in the forecast that there's another big storm heading towards Alaska next week.
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I guess we have the almost obligatory but wait, there's more. Does look like there's going to be another storm in the Bering Sea here early next week looks to take a different track and places that are not going to be severely impacted by this upcoming exhalong storm. Places like Bristol Bay are look to be more under the gun for early next week. Storm with strong winds and lots of rain and probably the seas will get cranked up in Bristol Bay.
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The hits just keep coming as they.
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Say, the hits just keep coming. It is that time of year and it's that kind of fall.
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That was Rick Thoman, a climatologist with the Alaska center for Climate Assessment and Preparedness. For continuing coverage of ex typhoon Ha Long and an extended version of this interview, check out alaskapublic.org and with this small reprieve between storms. Western Alaska communities are both assessing damage from the first and preparing for the second. KOM's Ben Townsend reports from Nome.
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Just days ago, 50 mile per hour wind gusts whipped communities across the Bering Strait region. Severe flooding left huge chunks of Kotzebue and Shishmaref underwater. Today in Nome, it's both the calm after the storm and before the storm. Water levels have receded and evacuation notices have been lifted. The sun is even shining and locals like 43 year Nome resident Mike Owens are already busy prepping for the next storm. Well, we're getting all the vehicles fueled up in in the event that there's an issue, prolonged issue, as far as.
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Everything outside of the house, we want.
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To make sure that things are picked.
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Up or tied down or are prepared.
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For high winds and just making sure everything's ready to go. Back on Front street near the seawall, new gold in China, owner Andy Kang is preparing for his first big storm.
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A lot of people told me say.
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You have to, you know, cover the whole windows and front doors, even the my back door have to be secure to make sure, you know, the water.
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Can get in there. With some help from the building's maintenance person, King plans to place sandbags at the entrances and cover windows with plywood.
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Emergency access back out the front door.
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At Nome's public safety building north of town, local and federal officials meet to debrief on Wednesday storm and prepare for the weekend. Following a briefing from the weather service, Nome City Manager Lee Smith tries to put the room at ease in his former role as county manager in Georgia. He says hurricanes were a common sight.
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Look, the first thing I want to say is first just breathe. I've had 170 mile an hour winds.
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And I know what it's like.
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It is scary. But stay calm, make reasonable decisions. Knee jerk done work.
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Officials are encouraging residents to gather emergency supplies like food, water and spare clothing. Loose property like boats, fish racks or building supplies should also be secured. In Nome, I'm Ben Townshend.
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An Anchorage restaurant worker who was detained by federal immigration officials in August has been released after a judge's ruling in a class action lawsuit. ICE arrested Santiago Martinez, a Mexican national seeking asylum in the US on August 11th outside the sushi restaurant where he work and sent him to the Northwest ICE Processing center in Tacoma, Washington. Martinez is one of at least 56 people detained by ICE in Alaska this year, according to the state Department of Corrections, which jails detainees under a contract with the federal government. Margaret Stock, Martinez's lawyer, says immigration judges in Seattle were refusing to let detainees out on bond. She says a legal advocacy group called the Northwest Immigrants Rights Project filed a class action law lawsuit against the Seattle ICE field office.
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They won their case and they got.
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An order from a federal judge saying.
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That people cannot be detained, that their detention is unlawful.
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U.S. district Court Judge Tiffany Cartwright issued a temporary restraining order, or tro, requiring that Martinez be released. He officially left ICE custody on Tuesday. Stock says there have been similar rulings across the country in recent months, but that doesn't mean every detainee is being released.
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And because Santiago had an attorney, me, I was able to assert his membership in the class and work with the.
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Lawyers to get the TRO issued.
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People who don't have an attorney, it's.
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Very difficult for them to deal with this situation.
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A regional ICE spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Stock says she's concerned over the high amount of immigration detentions during the Trump administration. She says the Department of Homeland Security is acting unlawfully and misrepresenting who's being detained.
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Although DHS claims they're only arresting criminals, that's not the case.
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They're going after mostly people that are not criminals.
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They're going after people who are legally.
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In the country, doing things that are perfectly legal, working legally.
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Stock says she plans to continue helping Martinez apply for asylum now that he's being released from detention. Martinez returned to Alaska Thursday night. His boss says he's set to return to work Saturday. The Alaska Board of Education unanimously voted to send a proposed regulation change back to the state Education Department Thursday. The proposal would have limited how much money local governments can give to schools. It comes after public outcry and a change in stance from the State Education Department. KTO's Jamie Deep reports the Department of.
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Education and Early Development, or deed, backtracked on its initial recommendation to the board to change state regulation that defines what counts as local contribution. That's school funding that comes from municipalities. State law restricts the amount of funding local governments can give to their districts. Instead, DEED recommended the board take no action on the change. DEED Commissioner Dina Bishop says the department has been working with district leaders since August to clarify their intentions with the.
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Proposal due to the state. I think just the stress about school.
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Funding, a lot of trust isn't there.
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The department wants to earn that trust.
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Back and continue with the work.
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Many district leaders voice concerns about how it would affect out of cap spending. That's money that local governments give to districts outside of the maximum legal amount. It's for non instructional purposes like transportation, childcare and extracurriculars. Many, like the Anchorage and Sitka school districts, also worried about how in kind services would be impacted. The proposal spurred hundreds of written public comments against the change last summer. Several Alaska district officials and parents testified when the regulation was considered in June and again at Thursday's meeting. Part of the initial reason for bringing this forward was something called the disparity test that allows the state to use federal impact aid as part of its contribution to districts, which can save the state money. The state failed the test this year and in fiscal year 2022. It's currently appealing the decision. Bishop said during a work session on Wednesday that the department is working through the appeals process, but she said that the focus on the regulation is to make sure districts are following state law.
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We're not reacting to the federal government.
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What we are is trying to meet.
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The state statute that calls for that equitable funding.
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In a memo for the regulation when it was introduced in June, Bishop wrote that one of the reasons for bringing the regulation change forward was to make sure it was in line with the federal disparity test. In his public testimony, Juneau School District Superintendent Frank Hauser referenced a letter from Deed appealing the results of the federal disparity test. The state claimed it would pass passed the test through a different calculation method and does not mention local contribution. Hauser says he wants the department to drop this regulation change.
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I am terrified of version 3.0 of this regulation. Each subsequent attempt at this regulation change has had exponentially more negative impacts, impacts.
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Beyond what the department realizes, even to.
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REAAs, homeschool and correspondence students.
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Gino officials estimated the district would have lost $8 million in funding if the regulation had gone through. In an email to KTOO after the decision, Hauser said he appreciates the board bringing the regulation back to the department to get more input. But that action begs the question why stakeholder input was not sought in the first place. Several testifiers, including Valdez City School's director of technology Megan Gunderson, also mentioned the back and forth between the Anchorage school district and the department. The department posted on social media, calling information from the district inaccurate.
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When the agency responsible for leading and.
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Supporting Alaska schools uses public mockery and.
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Personal targeting, that is not communication. It is the breakdown of an essential partnership.
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State Board of Education member lieutenant colonel James Fowley only had an advisory vote on the issue, but he said he wanted to ensure the department would come back with a list of districts it engaged with and recommendations in my learning on it.
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It is going to be incredibly complex.
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And it's probably going to vary between.
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Every single one of the districts. And so for the department, I think.
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You'Re going to have to sharpen that.
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Pencil and really nug down through this.
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In the meantime, the department says it will work with local stakeholders like district leaders and officials to gather more information. In Juneau, I'm Jamie Deep Floodwaters have.
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Receded in Kotzebue and other western Alaska communities from a storm that hit earlier this week. As KOTZ's Desiree Hagan reports, communities are documenting damages during the lull before a second, more powerful storm on track to hit the region early next week.
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Rain from the storm broke records in Nome and Kotzebue, according to the National Weather Service. Kotzebue had the most rainfall in a single day and there might have been more, but sensors stopped working sometime during the flooding. All that rain and wind rivaled last year's October storm, but officials say this year they were more prepared. Derek Kavlin Lee is Kotzebue's mayor.
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A lot of debris was washed up.
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On Front street again, a lot like last year.
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The north end of town was hit pretty hard.
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We are hoping to address some of that before the next storm.
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On October 9, Governor Mike Dunleavy issued a disaster declaration for western Alaska following a mandatory evacuation for Kotzbee residents. Haviland Lee says about 100 people sheltered on Wednesday night when the storm was most severe. Now, he says, the Northwest Arctic Borough, the state Emergency Operations center and Kotzebue officials are coordinating efforts to document the damage by going door to door in harder hit areas of town. He says some of the most severe damage to city infrastructure was to the first and second bridge.
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There was some undercutting on the abutments.
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To the bridges themselves.
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In some areas, up to six feet was eaten away.
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Ted Stevens Way, a nine mile loop that includes those bridges and leads to Kotzebue's drinking water source, is closed. Haviland Lee says the city could open it up to one lane access, but the bridge needs to be assessed by a state Department of Transportation engineer beforehand. Other northwest Arctic communities experience damage from the storm, says Melissa Ivanov, the borough's assistant to the mayor.
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So some of the disaster declarations that.
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We did receive is from the city.
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Of Kotzebue, city of Kivalina, city of Noatak and city of Deering.
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So we're working with the four communities.
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Within our region, Deering and Noatak reported erosion. A representative from Noatak's tribe said the storm affected areas already impacted by erosion near the community's drinking water line and airport Runway. Damage in Kivalina might be more extensive. Millie Hawley is Kivalina's tribal administrator.
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It's worst.
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It gets worse every year. The water levels are worse and the.
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Water came in more than usual, Holly says.
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About 80% of Kivalina's 400 residents evacuated to the community school, which is seven miles from town. Holly says she's worried about a new threat to the village, a channel that has started to develop between the airstrip and the community's dump.
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Our island will be less than a mile long. Right now it's eight miles long and.
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If there's a channel, then there'll be.
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Another free flow of water going in.
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The area and the village will fill up faster. Holly says. Search and rescue teams have been hauling gravel to try to prevent the channel from developing. She says. During the flooding, a portion of an elder's home burned and won't be livable for winter, she said. Another community member lost their boat. Holly says the community is beginning to prepare for the remnants of Typhoon Ha long set to hit Monday. Many of Kivalina's elders are leaving over the weekend to attend Alaska Federation of Natives. Holly says she's happy to know that at least the elders will be safe from the upcoming storm. In Kotzebue, I'm Desiree Hagan.
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Using samples gathered from a permafrost tunnel north of Fairbanks, researchers have awakened microbes that were last active as far back as 40,000 years ago. If that sounds like the opening scene in a sci fi horror movie, don't worry, say the researchers, who take precautions against unleashing anything dangerous. Plus, the process of ancient microbes reawakening is already happening on a much larger scale as climate warming thoughts permafrost all across the Arctic. And that's what they're really trying to get at. How long does it take the microbes, which themselves produce greenhouse gases, to wake from their slumber? That's a question Tristan Caro, a postdoctoral research scientist at the California Institute of Technology, aimed to answer in a recently published paper. But first, Caro says he and his colleagues had to venture into the permafrost tunnel in Fox, Alaska.
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The first thing you'll probably notice is the smell. It smells very musty, smells like a very, very old basement, which is the result of all this degrading carbon that's been locked away for thousands of years. And you're Kind of walking through time in a way. It's called a chronosequence for that reason. And you can see these ancient environments layered in the permafrost around you. So there's bones and leaves and branches of trees that are preserved over millennia that are from essentially the Ice Age.
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How do you actually collect the samples?
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Essentially what it looks like is kind of like this corer. It's kind of like a chainsaw motor that's hooked up to a drill that's about a meter long. And we would mount the corer horizontally on the wall and drill horizontal cores, the core of solid permafrost and ice hosted within. We pack up in a kind of a PVC tube and ship it back on ice so that these cores can stay intact.
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Cool. Yeah, I guess. Cool. Literally, yeah. So then what do you do? I mean, I've heard this described as like awakening the sleeping ancient microbes, but how do you actually do that?
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Microbes need two things. They need water, and they need a temperature that they can live at. And when permafrost thaws, it provides both of those. So the ice that's locked up in permafrost becomes liquid water again, which rehydrates the sample. And then once the permafrost thaws, they also get at a slightly elevated temperature. And you don't even need to go to, you know, particularly human comfortable temperatures. These microbes are perfectly happy growing at 39, 37 degrees Fahrenheit. And so, yeah, when we bring these cores back to the lab, we take a small chunk of it, put it in a sealed jar, and then slowly bring that jar up to a slightly above freezing temperature. And, and let the microbes do the work of waking up after a 40,000 year nap.
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So do they just spring back to life? Like, if we're describing this as a nap, do they just like pop out of bed or is it like how I get out of bed and I'm like, slowly like crawling out of bed with my eyes half closed and that kind of thing?
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Yeah, it's probably more like the second one. So that was part of the question. We went into research the rate at which these microorganisms resuscitate or awaken after a long period of dormancy. And we found that it did indeed take months for these organisms to wake up, to really convince themselves that, yes, it's time to start processing carbon and exhaling CO2 and methane, somewhere between one and six months. And that's an important finding. It really shows that these ecosystems even Though they're in suspended animation, they're very much still capable of supporting life from a microbiological or a climate perspective. The Arctic warms, the permafrost thaws. Permafrost contains CO2 and methane and will produce more CO2 and methane by the activity of microorganisms, which will cause the Arctic to continue to warm. And that's really a concern, this kind of self amplifying cycle. And we're starting to see it occur. So our research paper was getting at the, the rates or the speed at which microorganisms awaken after thaw, almost like a traffic cop with a radar gun. You know, we're shooting the radar gun at these microbes and seeing how fast they're acting and putting a number to it.
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Yeah, it's just like fascinating. I mean just 40,000 year old microbes in such a cold environment and being able to wake them up is fascinating. I think some people would wonder, is this safe to bring these microbes back to life? It sort of sounds like the plot to a movie or something. I wonder what you think about that.
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Yeah, it's certainly a fair question and it's something that I've thought about and our collaborators have thought about this concept of emerging pathogens from thawing permafrost and these environments that have been in suspended animation for a while. But it's not something we are too worried about for a variety of reasons. One, at least in terms of the lab experiments, we take back just a tiny portion of permafrost back to the lab and thaw it under extremely controlled conditions in bottles. And compared to the quantity of permafrost that is naturally thawing in the cold regions and naturally interacting with humans and animals and plants, this tiny, you know, imagine a mason jars worth of permafrost that we've thawed is not even a drop in the bucket compared to what is currently happening across the northern cold regions and the Arctic. And then on a personal level, like as I'm handling these samples, I'm an environmental microbiologist by training and there are just common sense safety procedures that you undertake when you're handling any kind of environmental sample, including, you know, natural soils like just in your yard. But even so, yeah, it's still worth being careful and it's still worth understanding that as these regions continue to warm, they're going to release novel organisms and strains that maybe we haven't really observed in modern environments. And so it's certainly worth monitoring and keeping track of. But it's not something that keeps me up at night.
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That was Tristan Caro, a postdoctoral research scientist at Caltech who, as a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, co authored a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research about awakening ancient microbes found in permafrost from Alaska. And that's all for this edition of Alaska News Nightly. If you missed any of tonight's stories, we're online@alaskapublic.org and wherever you get your podcasts. We had reports tonight from Ben Townsend in Nome, Wesley early in Anchorage, Jamie Deep in Juneau, and Desiree Hagan in Kotzebue. If you want to send us a news tip, question or comment, email us@newslaskapublic.org Our audio engineer is Chris Hyde. Madeline Rose is our producer, and I'm Casey Grove. Have a great weekend.
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Sam.