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Support for Alaska Public Media On Demand comes from Siri, an Alaska Native corporation with operations and investments spanning five continents, 45 states and two US territories.
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To do so would be a colossal mistake. It would end NATO.
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Alaska's senators weigh in on President Trump's talk of seizing Greenland from Alaska Public Media. This is statewide news on Alaska News nightly for Thursday, January 8th. Good evening. I'm Casey Grove. Also tonight, lawmakers want to know why the Department of Transportation canceled millions in Anchorage transportation projects. This is a crisis involving human lives, and here we are kicking the can down the road. Those stories and more tonight on Alaska News Nightly.
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The PFD application is open. Just a small amount of your PFD will help share local news and stories about Alaskans with Alaskans across this great state. When you choose Alaska Public Media through.
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Pick click give Alaska's U.S. senators split today on legislation requiring President Trump to get the approval of Congress before taking new military action in Venezuela. Senator Lisa Murkowski voted yes to advance the resolution, and Senator Dan Sullivan voted no. A final vote is likely next week on what some are calling a major rebuke of the president. In the meantime, some senators want a similar war powers resolution to restrain the administration from seizing Greenland. Murkowski says she can't believe it's reached this point. Alaska Public Media Washington correspondent Liz Ruskin.
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Reports Trump says taking Greenland is a national security priority. And White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt on they did not rule out using military force. All options are always on the table for President Trump as he examines what's in the best interest of the United States. Murkowski said on the Senate floor that the United States can't just take territory because it wants it to do so would be a colossal mistake. It would end NATO. It would be a gift to Russia and China and all autocratic nations who lust after new territory and want it to justify their own provocations. Back at her office after the speech, Murkowski said she does not believe Trump will actually send troops to take over Greenland. But when you, when you have words that are truly unsettling like that, it there's plenty of room for suspicion and concern and anxiety and worry by the people of Greenland, the people of Denmark, and quite honestly, the people of this country and around the world, our European allies. Murkowski voted to advance the Venezuela War Powers Resolution and says she'd do the same for a Greenland resolution if necessary, but she hopes it doesn't come to that. Senator Sullivan did not respond to interview requests this week about Venezuela or Greenland his office sent an op ed he wrote last year touting Alaska's strategic importance as an alternative to Green. His staff also sent a statement explaining his opposition to the resolution blocking military action against Venezuela without the consent of Congress. It says Sullivan doesn't want to limit the authority of President Trump to defend the homeland from, quote, Venezuelan narco terrorists. Trump lashed out at Murkowski and the four other Republicans who voted to advance the War Powers Resolution, saying on social media they should never be elected to office again. Murkowski's term doesn't expire until 2029. Sullivan is running for reelection this year and has Trump's endorsement. Reporting from Washington, I'm Liz Ruskin.
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In other Congressional news, the U.S. house today voted to revive expired health care subsidies, with 17 Republicans crossing the aisle. Alaska Congressman Nick Begich voted no. The bill has little chance of passing the Senate as written, but senators are working on a compromise. State transportation officials have pulled nearly $20 million in federal funding to improve some of Anchorage's most deadly roads. The move surprised and outraged state legislators and local leaders. As Alaska Public Media's Hannah Flor reports, they say it doesn't make sense in a city that has seen record numbers of pedestrian deaths.
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State Representative Ted Eishide says he's livid.
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This is a crisis involving human lives and here we are kicking the can down the road.
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Eishite is one of 27 lawmakers, nearly half the Alaska Legislature, who signed a strongly worded letter to the state Department of Transportation after the agency pulled close to $20 million from Anchorage area transportation projects. That's about two thirds of total planned funding for the area from a federal program to improve safety on state roads. DOT officials say it will now go to other projects throughout the state. Aishaid says he was shocked to hear about the state's change of plans. It felt very sudden.
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I don't understand it. I've not heard a good explanation. And in that context, I think it's wrong. I don't think it's good government because people's lives are what we're talking about.
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DOT spokesperson Shannon McCarthy says for the first time in a long time, there's not enough federal safety money to go around. So DOT is prioritizing shovel ready projects that can get done this year. Plus, she says some of the Anchorage projects need to be studied more.
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Our best intentions are to try to get as many projects out on the street as quickly as possible and to really do the research and data so that we can stand behind any project and we can say this was well thought out.
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But Anchorage Assemblymember Erin Baldwin Day says the explanations don't hold water. Even if funding is short, she says the projects DOT pulled are almost exclusively in Anchorage. She says it feels like the city is being singled out with disproportionately low funding going to a place with disproportionately high pedestrian deaths, 30 over the past two years.
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Either this is a situation of active negligence, incompetence or outright hostility. Those are the only three explanations for this level of asymmetry. And I, I can't come up with a fourth option.
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Many of the main roads in Anchorage are owned by the state, and they're where most of the deaths are happening. Baldwin Day says that means to improve safety, the Muni and the state have to work together. The nearly $20 million would have paid for more than half a dozen projects in Anchorage, including cutting a lane on both Inger and Gamble to slow traffic. Also on the list, Northern Lights Boulevard with wider sidewalks, fewer lanes and speed limit reductions, and a street with a lane reduction and more traffic lights. DOT data shows that in the past five years in those combined areas, the proposed changes could have helped prevent nearly 50 deaths or serious injuries. Baldwin Day says that's why it's a misuse of federal safety funding to prioritize projects that can be completed this year.
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If we allocate funds to smaller projects that are, quote, shovel ready and might save one life every four years, we are by definition defunding projects that would save multiple lives every year.
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But Baldwin Day says there is a silver lining. She's heartened to see the collaboration between Alaska legislators and city officials all pushing back against DOT's decision. McCarthy, with the state, says DOT was surprised by some of that pushback, and she says the department would like more.
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Constructive dialogue, like to have a relationship in which the worst is not assumed and that we're working together to make Anchorage roads safer for everyone.
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Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance has met with the DOT commissioner, who she says recognizes the significant needs of the municipality. And LaFrance has said she's also talking to Governor Mike Dunleavy about potential solutions. In Anchorage, I'm Hannah Fluor.
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Still to come on Alaska News Nightly, the restoration of Alaska's last steam engine culminates in firing its boiler.
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Pretty soon it's sitting there going, k', thump, k' thump, k' thump, kathom. That's the heartbeat of any steam locomotive.
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Hi, I'm Avery Elfelt, a reporter with the Alaska Desk. That's a joint reporting effort from Alaska Public Media, KHNs where I work in Haines, and other public radio stations in Anchorage, Fairbanks and the Aleutians. It allows us to connect you with the issues happening in communities all across the state. You can hear our stories during the morning news on Alaska News Nightly or online@alaskapublic.org the Alaska Desk is only possible with the support of grants and listeners like you. Thank you.
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The city of Hoonah declared a local emergency this week following heavy snowstorms in the region. The Hoonah City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved a disaster declaration which opens the door for the southeast community to request aid from the state. Governor Mike Dunleavy approved the declaration earlier today. Hoonah City administrator Dennis Gray Jr. Says the community has been overwhelmed with the snow and needs assistance. As of yesterday morning, the National Weather Service in Juneau recorded at least 3ft of snow in Hoonah since late December. We're facing the same issues at Juneau as we had three boats sink in our harbor. We have two that are still sunk.
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And causing damage to the floats.
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Hoonah's declaration comes around the same time that city and tribal leaders in Juneau announced a joint disaster declaration after back to back snowstorms dumped more than 4ft of snow on Juneau. Gray says Hoonah city staff and residents are struggling to keep up with snow removal on buildings, boats and roads. He says multiple porches and trailers have collapsed or been damaged due to the increasingly heavy snowpack. Today we had eight men on top of our wastewater plant shoveling off snow to make sure it didn't collapse. So yeah, it's just it's a big mess. Gray says the city is requesting assistance from the state primarily to help recover two large sunken vessels that local equipment is unable to remove from the harbor. Both Hoonah and the capital city are bracing for an atmospheric river expected to hit southeast tonight that will bring heavy rain and potential flooding. And the Juneau School District plans to close at least two schools to remove snow on the building's roofs following recent record breaking snowstorms storms. The district closed Sid ITI Shanak Glacier Valley elementary first and reopened the rest of its schools Wednesday following district wide closures Monday and Tuesday. During a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Juneau Assistant City Manager Robert Barr says a team of engineers determined the elementary school needs to be shoveled first. We started there due to pre existing damage that we knew about at that facility that made us more concerned for that roof. In particular, barr says the city contracted with a 25 person out of state team to work on the school. As of Wednesday, the district says no school is above its load capacity based on measurements taken. Glacier Valley will remain closed for the rest of the week. Mendenhall River Community School is next in line for shoveling. Though most schools are open, Superintendent Frank Hauser says students will be excused if they can't attend school due to unsafe weather conditions. Even when schools are open, you know.
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The conditions in your immediate neighborhood and.
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Are the best judge of whether or not to send your child to school. With parking limited at Juno Douglas High School, Yada Atkahleh, the district encourages high school students to take the school bus or public transit to school. Students also have the option to park at Thunder Mountain Middle School and take a bus in school. Buses will be running snow routes all week, the district says, and will not be going to trailer parks due to conditions. Forecasters are expecting another wave of snow for Anchorage heading into the weekend. National Weather Service Anchorage meteorologist Daniel Johnston said a system is on track to blow in from the Gulf of Alaska on Friday evening. We're fairly certain that the Anchorage area will get between 5 and 10 inches of snow, with blowing snow a possibility as the winds pick up Friday evening through the day on Saturday. Johnston says that Friday snowfall could complicate the evening commute, with winds gusting between 20 and 30 miles an hour leading to lower visibility. The National Weather Service on Thursday issued a winter storm watch for Friday evening to Sunday morning warning of as much as a foot of snow. But forecasters say they only expect the heaviest snow at higher elevations and most of Anchorage in the Mat Su Borough should see significantly less. That follows a record setting two day storm that dumped a little over 19 inches between Sunday and Tuesday, though schools and city services continued largely uninterrupted. The snowfall was followed by a period of very cold temperatures that delayed some school bus pickups on Thursday, according to the Anchorage School District. Anchorage International Airport recorded a high of 9 below this afternoon. Johnston says the storm will bring some relief temperature wise. We are seeing temperatures for Friday, Saturday and Sunday still high temperatures in the middle 20s and lows in the low teens. Next week, Johnson says, Anchorage could see even more snow. Well, several caribou herds in Alaska's Arctic are on a decline, including now the porcupine herd, which is currently the biggest. That's according to state Department of Fish and Game data released this week. But as Alyona Nydin reports for the Alaska Desk, biologists say the reasons for the downward trend are hard to pin down.
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The Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced that both the porcupine and Central Arctic caribou herds have faltered. That's on top of a drastic decrease for the large western Arctic caribou herd that the department announced in December. Mark Nelson is a wildlife biologist with the department. He lives in Fairbanks and focuses on the herds in his region. But he says he's aware of the bigger trend.
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The general consensus is that a lot.
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Of these, especially these Arctic herds, are.
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Declining at the moment. But what that means as far as.
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The future or what's driving it, I really don't know.
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The porcupine caribou herd roams across the eastern part of Alaska's Arctic and into Canada. It is only hunted by Arctic village residents and flying hunters. The herd was among a few that were considered thriving after reaching its all time population high eight years ago. But this year's census showed that it's since decreased by about 75,000 animals, which is more than 30%. Nelson says the news was not a surprise.
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We were all pretty sure we were in some level of decline and that's based on things like adult survival, calf survival, parturition rates, like the rate at which those females are giving birth, nelson says.
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The decline might be connected to predation.
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Or food availability, but there's clearly no smoking gun. There's no one thing here that's causing this, nelson says.
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Biologists expect to see a few more years of decline before the porcupine herd stabilizes again. The Central Arctic caribou herd is a smaller herd that migrates in the central part of the North Slope around Deadhorse. Its population also dropped this year by over 20%. Nelson says that herd has also seen lower calf and cow survival. People from the North Slope communities of New Exit and Anktuvik Pass hunt the Central Arctic herd, as well as people in Wiseman and some Alaskans who drive up the Dalton highway from Fairbanks. Nelson says he doesn't anticipate any changes to hunting regulations this year. In Anchorage, I am Alena Knighton.
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The Bogus Creek 150 sled dog race has been postponed due to extreme cold weather conditions. KYUK's Samantha Watson reports on how this year's dog mushing season on the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta looks a lot different than last year's.
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Lately, life on the delta has required a few extra layers. It's been cold and okay, it's January in Alaska, but it's a lot different than last year, which was among the warmest on record for the region last December and January. The inconsistent snow and warm weather meant both the K300 and Bogus Creek sled dog events had to be rescheduled, among others. This week, the Bogus Creek out and back race was postponed again, but this time the race committee is citing the extreme cold snap. The scheduled race weekend had forecasted wind chills that could drop temperatures close to 40 degrees below zero. That kind of cold can be dangerous for dogs and mushers, and the unrelenting low temperatures leading up to the race made it difficult for volunteers to mark trails. And this year, race manager Paul Basel says the first two races of the K300 season have occurred as scheduled.
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I'm not sure that's ever happened in the years I've been managing, basel says.
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The recent weather has brought its own obstacles. He says mushers have reported a challenging stretch of preseason training, navigating ice storms, freezing winds and sub zero temperatures.
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There's snow and so when the weather is reasonable enough, mushers are getting out and certainly some I think are feeling like they're in an okay place. But it's been a challenging stretch for sure. Different kind of challenging than they're used.
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To, maybe in the warm temperatures. Some teams left the YK Delta to seek the snowpack of the interior to train. Musher Raymond Alexey of Kwithlook told Kyuk in 2025 he traveled with his dogs to the Denali area to run on snow covered trail. But this year is different.
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Folks in the Mat Su Valley until this week had virtually no snow. It's usually the other way around. All those dog mushers that live in Willow and Kinnick and Big Lake, they're all training on beautiful trails and then they come out here and have to face the ice. This year it's so far been the other way around.
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The race has not yet been rescheduled, but the race committee says the K300 slated to begin Jan. 23, remains on track at this time. In Bethel, I'm Samantha Watson.
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The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported yesterday that Canada's Yukon Quest sled dog race will not run this year. That's because there's nobody left to organize it, according to mushers and former board members cited in the CBC report. Alaska's Yukon Quest, however, is still happening in early February, covering 750 miles and starting and ending in Fairbanks. Lisa Mackey is the board president of Yukon Quest Alaska. She says her heart breaks for her Canadian counterparts, but she knows how hard it is to put on a long distance race.
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And I don't think that people realize behind the scenes all the moving parts it takes. I know what we have gone through this year just to put on this 750 not only working our day jobs but also putting countless hours into making.
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Sure that this happens.
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And it's smooth. Yeah, it's. It's sad news.
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The races used to be one in the same. It was organized by two boards, one American and one Canadian. Mushers raced a thousand mile route from Fairbanks to Whitehorse in the Yukon territory. But pandemic era border restrictions and disagreements over mandatory rest times for dogs caused a Rift in 2022 and the Yukon Quest broke into two smaller races on either side of the border. Mackey says she hopes to see the Canadian race get back on its feet and maybe someday reunify with Alaska's.
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There is no bad blood between Canada and us. I think that we've all just been trying to get our foundations back underneath us since COVID It's hard to put a race together, but it's easy to rip it apart.
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But she says her hopes are tempered by reality and that reunification would take a lot of hard work and time. The Yukon Quest board in Canada could not be reached for comment. The last steam locomotive to pull trains on the Alaska Railroad is getting new life. Engine 557 ran on coal when it first came to Alaska in 1944. It was later converted to run on oil and retired in the 50s. Then sold in the 60s to a scrap dealer and museum owner in Washington state where it sat for decades. 557 returned to Alaska in 2012 to be rebuilt with the expectation that it will someday once again chug along the rails of South Central. In November, the nonprofit 557 Restoration Company fired up the old engine outside its home shop in Wasilla. And of course they just had to blow its steam whistle. 557 restoration company president Patrick Durand says hearing that moment was the culmination of 13 years of work and hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours.
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That was a phenomenal day. We had a checklist of everything necessary to fire the boiler and then what ifs. If this happens, this happens. Just a punch list. We rolled it out about noon. It was like 20 degrees. Crystal clear sky sun. We hooked up the air which we used to start the burner and the fire just gets so hot and it just kept going. And my goodness, we're sitting here with steam. So well, let's try the whistle.
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Of course.
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Got to right.
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So we have to play with the whistle and turn the steam on and pretty soon it's sitting There going kathom, Kathom, Kathom, Kathom. That's the heartbeat of any steam locomotive. And I don't know, you might hear it in my voice. But all of those things were inspiring for the crew. Let's say you never saw so many smiles among the crew. I think there were 13 people in the crew that day. The whole experience was a matter of our patting ourselves on the back for 13 years of effort, well invested.
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Where did Engine 557 come from? Like what kind of engine is it? And then how did it end up In Alaska?
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Engine 557 is one of the locomotives in the S160 class. It was called by Baldwin Locomotive Works and Baldwin, Lima and Alco, the three big manufacturers in 1940, early 1940s were all building the same locomotive to a military contract. 2,120 identical locomotives over a 28 month period. Hard to imagine just cranking them out and they were all being built to go to war. Of the 18 that stayed here, 12 of them came to Alaska. The last three, including 557 were in the last shipment. And they never saw service in Europe. They were reserved new as new construction for the Alaska Railroad. And they needed these here because they realized that the railroad was the key infrastructure that they were going to use to get things to the interior of Alaska.
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Things used to be so different. I mean you could run this on coal originally and get around and move stuff around. Right? I mean, you said that part of the reason that this project is happening is to try to explain that to people now in the 2020s or beyond. But I mean, for you, what about steam engines do you find so interesting?
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Well, until you actually sit in the cab of a steam locomotive and go 50 miles and you watch everything that's going on, you don't really appreciate all of the mechanical systems that have to shake hands to make this thing go down the track. And I guess it's just a fascination with things mechanical that I've always had. And this afflicts quite a few people. Fortunately, that's where our volunteers come from. And I can't say enough about their involvement, but they're there for the same reason I am. We want to see it in steam. We have an expression for that affliction. It really is an affliction and it's called ferre equinosis, Iron horse disease.
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That was Patrick Duran, president of the non profit engine 557 Restoration Company which aims to put Alaska's last steam locomotive back on the rails. For updates, check out the 557 Restoration Company page on Facebook. 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 Liz Ruskin in Washington, D.C. hannah Flor and Ilona Nydin in Anchorage, Clarice Larson, Jamie Deep in Eric Stone in Juneau, Samantha Watson in Bethel, and Shelby Herbert in Fairbanks. If you want to send us a news tip, question or comment, email us@newsalaskapublic.org Our audio engineer is Crystal Hyde. Madeline Rose is our producer. And I'm Casey Grove. Good night. This is statewide news on Alaska Public Media.