April 3: Booze aboard the Ranger

Booze and the Alaska Ranger. An assistant engineer on watch aboard the fishing vessel Alaska Ranger before it sank on March 23 admitted during testimony this week that he sometimes drank while the ship was at sea, according to stories from KIAL in Unalaska and The Seattle Times. Another crewman testified at a hearing in Dutch Harbor that the assistant engineer, Rodney Lundy, was a good engineer but had a drinking problem and probably should not have been aboard the vessel, according to the stories.

The Marine Board of Investigation, which is looking into the circumstances of the episode in which five Alaska Ranger crewmen lost their lives, plans to move to Anchorage on Saturday, and more interviews will take place this month in Seattle, where information will be sought from surviving crewmen, according to the KIAL story.

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“Is Homer growing?” So asks the headline on a Homer News story, which goes on to say that maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, depending on how you look at it geographically. Growth has been cited in the community as the major impetus for several projects, including an expanded hospital, but it’s not clear that the growth arguments match the reality.

The story cites Alaska Department of Labor and Workforce Development figures showing Homer dropped 33 people from 2002 until 2007, when the population was 5,502. The population did increase, however, on the lower Kenai Peninsula as a whole.

More certain, according to a separate News story, is that the community’s student count is shrinking. The five public school buildings in Homer house 1,216 students, compared to 10 years ago when enrollment was 1,413. Combining schools in Homer has been the subject of more than one conversation, Donna Peterson, superintendent of the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District, told the newspaper.

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Water and disease. Nearly 30 percent of the Alaska homes looked at in a recent study of the link between water systems and disease did not have piped, running water or sewer systems, according to an APRN story. That compares with a figure nationwide of 1 percent.

The study looked at 12,000 homes in 128 villages and found that the availability of water service varied widely. “There are some areas in rural Alaska that have 100 percent of homes that have water service,” said Dr. Tom Hennessy of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “And then there were three regions in the western part of the state where water service was much lower. In fact, the lowest region … had only 57 percent of homes that had water service going to them.”

Skin infections and respiratory ailments were higher in areas that had no in-home water service, according to the story. Hennessy said that could be because of the tendency to limit water for hygiene purposes when it has to be hauled to the home.

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Flying lab is bound for Arctic. A DC-8 that has been made into a flying laboratory is headed for Fairbanks this week, according to a posting on Aero-News web site. The aircraft and scientists aboard it have in their sights “one of the largest international atmospheric studies ever attempted.”

Run by NASA and a few partners, the mission will be looking at climate change and how it is affecting the region. “The Arctic is a poster child of global change, and we don't understand the processes that are driving that rapid change,” said Daniel Jacob, a project scientist from Harvard University. “We need to understand it better, and that's why we’re going.”

Meanwhile, an Associated Press story reports that the Seattle-based icebreaker Polar Sea is also headed for Alaska, intending to study seals and visit Alaska communities. The Coast Guard said research aboard the vessel will look at the populations of four species of ice seals.

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Wolf kills begin. A story in the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming reports that at least three wolves were killed last weekend in the state immediately after the animals lost their protection under the federal Endangered Species Act on Friday. The removal from the federal listing put wolf management in the hands of the state.

“Wolves in the state’s extreme northwest corner are now in the animal’s trophy game zone and are still afforded some protection,” according to the story. “Wolves in the rest of the state are considered predators, similar to coyotes.

Large numbers of hunters were out looking for wolves over the weekend, one outfitter told the newspaper, but he added: “I think they’re finding just what we figured. … These wolves are an extremely tough animal to hunt.”

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Administration backs Darfur measure. The Palin administration has indicated that it backs a measure that would require taking Alaska public funds out of any holdings in Sudan because of violence in Darfur, according to a Juneau Empire story. Department of Revenue Commissioner Patrick Galvin supported the bill, which has been opposed by Alaska Permanent Fund Corp. officials, during a Senate committee hearing this week.

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New tug on the job. A Peninsula Clarion story reports on the arrival in Homer of a new tractor tugboat that will be the first of its kind to be permanently stationed in Cook Inlet. The vessel will make transporting oil in tankers safer, according to the story.

“The Cook Inlet Regional Citizens Advisory Council has long advocated for a full-time tug at Nikiski as an added precaution during wintertime oil tanker docking procedures. Currently, assist tugs are not required by U.S. Coast Guard and state regulations in the Inlet,” the story says.

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“One Alaska village under God.” A Washington Post story, written by “Finding Faith" columnist Christy McKerney, tells of the writer’s visit to Minto, where she got an introduction to the new Worship Center there. She found in the center “an open space, reminiscent of the Alaskan wilderness outside the village — spare, clean and uncluttered,” according to the piece.

She also talked at length to some of the people there regarding what they are calling a spiritual renewal.

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“Hogwash.” A Fairbanks Daily News-Miner editorial today takes vigorous issue with the Citizens Against Government Waste’s “Pig Book,” which is the organization’s list of what it views as pork-barrel projects in the federal budget. Alaska rates at the top of per-capita spending on the list.

The editorial argues: “Alaska and Hawaii, the nation’s youngest states, have in recent years acquired much more through the earmarks process than many of their sister states. It’s a good and fair argument by earmark supporters that states Nos. 49 and 50 haven’t benefited from targeted spending nearly as long as the other states and that they are just playing catch-up after all these years.”

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Tax dodgers’ days numbered. “We may not get to a person for a while, but sooner or later we will.” So says Juneau City Attorney John Hartle in a Juneau Empire story on the city’s efforts to catch up with the scores of businesses that are delinquent in paying their city sales tax. The money owed by the businesses approaches half a million dollars, according to the story.

“For fiscal year 2007, the city predicted it would collect $384,000 in penalties and interest on sales tax, property tax and local improvement districts, but it actually collected $752,000, according to its 2007 annual report,” the story says. “Total sales tax revenue for that year was $38.6 million.”

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Mouse mousse. A Guardian food columnist working his way through the alphabet got to “M” and stopped long enough to come up with a recipe for a “mouth-watering moose mousse.” The mix of meat and spices and syrup serves four, and the writer pauses long enough in his explanation of how he arrived at the recipe to set down a list of what he calls “deeply serious moose facts,” including this one: “An angry moose can be very dangerous. Each year in Alaska, for instance, there are more moose-related than bear-related deaths.”