The Redoubt Reporter

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2009-04-21T21:28:00.004-08:00

The Redoubt Reporter's Web site has moved. Please visit our new site at:
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To contact the paper directly, please e-mail redoubtreporter@alaska.net,
or call Jenny Neyman at 907-262-5162, or 907-394-NEWS (6397)
Thank you.

No paper this week

2009-04-15T15:15:00.001-08:00

The Redoubt Reporter will resume publication April 22. Happy Easter!

Erupting creativity

2009-04-07T23:31:00.002-08:00

The Redoubt Reporter newspaper is seeking submissions of photos and haiku poetry of Mount Redoubt's recent unrest. As many submissions as space allows will be printed in the April 22 edition. A winning photo and haiku will be selected, and will receive a year's subscription to the paper, a T-shirt and be featured in the paper. The deadline for submissions is April 18.

Photos should be of the volcano, its recent eruptions, steam plumes, ash or anything related to it. Digital submissions should be at least 220 dpi resolution at 6 inches wide, if horizontal, or four inches wide, if vertical, in JPEG, EPS, PDF or TIFF format. Digital photos may be e-mailed to redoubtreporterphotos@gmail.com or saved to a disk and mailed or dropped off at our office, 155 Smith Way, Suite 205 C, Soldotna, AK, 99669. Photo prints may be mailed or dropped off. Please include the photographer's name, town of residence, when and where the photo was taken, and contact information.

Poems must follow the haiku format — three lines, the first being five syllables, the second line seven syllables, and the third line five syllables. Please include the author’s name, town of residence, age category (student or adult), and contact information. Poems may be e-mailed to redoubtreporter@alaska.net, or mailed or dropped off at our office, at the address listed above.

For more information, contact Jenny Neyman, redoubtreporter@alaska.net, 394-6397.

Breaking up is hard to do — Road crews work to keep streets clear

2009-04-07T23:30:00.001-08:00

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

It’s a street fight out there.

A battle waged in rubber boots and rain gear, with steam wands and snowplows, where the enemy creeps forward to gain territory at night, and no matter how hard crews work, their efforts end up all wet.

It’s breakup on the Kenai Peninsula. The season of soggy, the damp hurdle that must be mucked through before the first glimmers of spring can sprout and germinate into the promise of summer.

Left to itself, nature takes its course. The almost 14 hours of sunlight and temperatures into the upper 30s and low 40s during the day will slowly thaw the ground and open up the streams, lakes and other waterways that will sluice away the melting piles of snow that have been stockpiled all winter.

In the meantime, it’s up to road crews to keep that process from interfering with civilization as much as possible.

“The public is our number one priority inside Soldotna, especially this time of year. We try to keep streets clear and water puddles and stuff down so they can move freely,” said Morgan Burdick, acting manager of the street maintenance department.

Breakup is one of the street maintenance department’s busiest times of year, Burdick said. It’s a constant daily battle of unclogging storm drains and culverts, shoving sodden snow back from streets and coaxing sometimes lakelike bodies of water to hang out somewhere other than the middle of the street.

The battle can last for weeks or months. This round has been going on in earnest for about three weeks now.

“Breakup depends on how sudden and dramatic it is. If we go into a freeze-thaw type cycle, where it’s cold in morning and warms up in the afternoon pushing high 30s or 40s, we’ll have quick breakup. Of course, it all depends on how dramatic that is,” said Wayne Ogle, public works director with the city of Kenai.

Ed Mallette and Gary Conradi, with Soldotna’s street maintenance department, responded to a clog on Shady Lane near the Veterans of Foreign Wars post near the end of March that was in desperate need of their attention. It was either that or call the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to stock the puddle and post signs recommending life vests be worn at all times.

The several-inches-deep puddle covered the entire road and stretched for about five vehicle lengths. There was no getting around it, only plowing through. That’s the danger of breakup driving. It’s difficult to judge the depth of the water, much less be able to tell if there’s ice, potholes or ruts on the road underneath.

Vehicles can slip, skid or hydroplane, and the water can impair visibility for the driver and whoever is near enough to get sprayed by their wake. And at night, that water turns back into ice.

“With freeze-thaw cycles, people just need to be kind of aware it’s all iced up all of a sudden where it was water before,” Ogle said. “Roads can get black ice on them in the evening. People need to be a little more mindful of that.”

Mallette and Conradi couldn’t see under the water to Shady Lane’s ice ruts, either, so they shuffled more than waded as they worked on drains on either side of the road.

They traded off between a shovel and the wand from a steam truck that is used to thaw ice from chocked-up drains and culverts, giving the water someplace else to go.

“This method is a lot nicer,” said Mallette. Before the city got the steam truck crews would find drains with a metal detector then chip away at them with a steel bar, he said. But even that wasn’t as bad as some of the tasks that fall to the maintenance crews.

“When it’s 25, 30 below and you have to do sewers. That’s probably one of the worst jobs. This is almost pleasant,” Mallette said.

Preventative maint-enance is part of the battle, which is why road crews in Kenai and Soldotna devote whatever time they have left over from plowing and sanding in the winter to scraping off ice and pushing snow berms farther back from streets and drains.

“With a lot of the maintenance and work we do over the year we don’t have near the water problems we used to,” Burdick said. “I can remember (about 25) years before on East Redoubt seeing people out there with canoes trying to get from one side to the other.”

But there’s only so much that can be done in advance.

“It’s more labor intensive when it starts breaking up. If it all happens at once, it ain’t something you can do ahead of time,” Conradi said.

“If it gets really cold at night, some of them re-freeze. Mother Nature has a lot to do with it.”

So do technology and experience. Steam trucks make a huge difference, Ogle said, as does knowing where the perennial problem spots are.

“One of the benefits is we try to know and locate them ourselves. We try to anticipate it and try to make sure it is as free as possible,” Ogle said. “But you can sometimes get fooled by the fact that it looks like it’s getting ready to do the big thaw and be done with it, then it goes back into the freeze cycle.”

Burdick said breakup has been relatively painless in Soldotna so far, with some of the worst spots already taken care of — like the moat that used to form every year on SoHi Lane.

“Things actually are going pretty good. There’s not really any hot spots for us as of yet. Most of the water spots that were deep and a problem the crews have been taking care of very well,” he said. “Our streets are starting to look really good. I know during the day after we leave they get somewhat slushy and freeze. We get some complaints of rough roads and we take care of them as soon as we get in.”

Burdick and Ogle encourage residents to call their local maintenance department to report problem areas that haven’t been addressed.

“If we don’t know about them, we can’t fix them. We take care of them as soon as we get phone calls,” Burdick said.

Just as nature is cyclical, so is the to-do list for those tasked with limiting nature’s inconveniences. As crews begin to turn the tide — literally — against breakup, it won’t be long before they’re preparing for it again.

“The city needs to transition from winter mode to spring mode and everybody wants to see the sand gone. It’s always something we’re rushing around trying to get the sweepers going,” Ogle said. “We start getting winter equipment ready about the middle of July. We’re always about a season ahead of anticipation.”

Electric issues spark HEA candidacies — 11 board hopefuls have different views on what’s best for co-op

2009-04-07T23:28:00.001-08:00

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

The Homer Electric Association Board of Directors elections this year have drawn extra attention due to skyrocketing electricity rates, dwindling natural gas reserves, questions over coal power, the pursuit of renewable energy sources and a proposal to merge elements of the Railbelt utilities.

Ballots were mailed out Friday and are due May 6, or HEA members may attend the annual meeting May 7 at Homer High School in Homer to cast their vote. Eleven candidates are seeking three seats in three districts. District 1 covers Kenai, Nikiski and parts of the Soldotna area. District 2 is Soldotna, Sterling and Kasilof. District 3 is Kasilof south to Kachemak Bay area. Members may only vote for one candidate in their district.

Following are questions asked of each candidate and their answers. Candidates’ resumes can be found online at www.homerelectric.com.

1. Gov. Sarah Palin has suggested merging the power generation and transportation functions of the Railbelt electric utilities, which is now being considered by the Legislature. Do you support this move? Why or why not?
2. What’s your take on renewables?
3. Do you support the proposed hydropower projects near Moose Pass? Why or why not?
4. Do you support HEA’s involvement with the Healy coal facility? Why or why not?
5. HEA’s contract to purchase wholesale power with Chugach Electric will be up in 2014. What should be done to secure a sustainable power supply for HEA?
6. What should be done to stabilize and/or lower rates for HEA members?
7. Are there any other issues facing HEA that are a priority for you?

District 1

Alan Bute
1. “The bottom line on anything is my pocketbook, so, financially, if it’s the right thing to do. We don’t want to get into a boondoggle. It sounds like a good idea because it would give us the strength to build whatever we got to to give us a stable power rate.”
2. “I guess you can’t beat it. I look at like the dams and stuff like that where you don’t have no pollution and stuff where you have a lifeline of power, and the same thing with wind power. The bottom line is cost, it always comes back to that. The people who have to put food on the table and stuff like that have to watch the bottom line.”
3. “I know they’re doing studies as far as what, economically, what’s the most feasible. If you can’t get anything pushed through, what can be done? You can’t hurt the fish. If we can build small dams that don’t mess up the community too much, and the bottom line is if the community don’t want it, it’s not a good deal either. You can’t push it down their throat.”
4. “Back to the dollar sign again, if we can do it economically. … You want to make sure the smokestacks are burning clean, but I guess you have to look at it because you have coal everywhere you look — it’s all over. I don’t know about a long-term contract, maybe just something to carry us over until we get something renewable that everybody can agree on.”
5. “Whatever we do, if we get together with other utilities in the state, and we gotta make sure we have some kind of control over the price, as far as how it affects our bills and stuff like that. You can’t in the middle of winter find 20, 30 percent increase in their bill. People on a real tight budget, it’s just too much for them.”
6. “Basically the direction they’re going with the study group out there is seeing what’s the most viable thing we can do, with the bottom line being the cost and affecting the rate payers. All those options, (wind, solar) sound good, we just gotta use some common sense and get a stable power source that’s affordable for everyone.”
7. “No. Over the years it seems like a really solid organization.”

Andrew Patrick
1. “I’m not necessarily a proponent of it. … From what my understanding of it is, it wouldn’t necessarily allow a local co-op like ours to meet the specific needs of our members, by taking control (away), which, I’m sure control would leave us here and go to a distant location. That is not usually a good direction.”
2. “I’m for them. I think it’s something that’s an ideal long-term goal, but I also know not every renewable source out there has true economic viability to use in a commercial application, such as a major utility. But, you know, it’s an avenue that needs to be actively pursued with the utility.”
3. “I think that they’re a good direction in the sense they are renewable. One of the biggest concerns we could have with them is they are small scale, so a lot of the overhead costs (environmental studies, engineering costs, etc.) will be almost the same as a large-scale project. … As far as their impact, there is no perfect project. They’re always going to impact somebody. Unfortunately, maybe here it may just seem like the lesser of the evils that are out there.”
4. “I support the diversification direction, for sure. Whether this is the best direction or best step I can’t tell you right now. It’s something they’re looking at to analyze what are the other alternatives out there, is this the first one that came to the door or the best one to pursue in light of the other alternatives that are out there?”
5. “We’ve been fortunate to have a low-cost power source with natural gas. That era I think is coming to a close. … Once we know the alternatives we can weigh which direction or generation source would give us the best benefit. Not necessarily cost, but also overall impact on people.”
6. “The more our production sources are diversified, the more stable our rates will be. It’s a principle that’s been applied to a variety of industries and types of businesses. … Tied with that is a certain amount of efficiency must be monitored. That’s the job of the board. … Cost controls and efficiency, combine the two and that will give us price stability.”
7. “I’m not critical of anybody. … They do represent the membership, so as such I think they do as good a job as any board can be expected to do.”

District 2

Jim Fassler
1. “I strongly support this. … Every time a kilowatt of power passes through someone else’s hands it costs us. … Right now, we HEA members own about 12 percent of the power that’s generated at Bradley Lake, that’s all we can use of that. The rest of that belongs to other co-op power companies and they sell it back to us. With a generation co-op, wherever it’s generated it will be used there first.”
2. “Those are all terrific. I think that we should be exploring those and moving to them as quickly as possible, but it’s going to be very expensive to do that.”
Fassler noted concerns about the noise wind turbines may generate, and about reliability of wind on calm days and of solar in the winter, and also said he’d like to see tidal power, possibly attached to drilling platforms in Cook Inlet.
3. “I haven’t seen the studies on those, I would support them if its not going to cause problems with spawning and etc.”
4. “Yes I do. One of the things that I understand is that the state wants Homer Electric to enter into a 25-year contract. I think we should go in increments of five, but we definitely need to be looking at power from that source again in order to get through to the point where wind or whatever will take it over. I would just as soon we do not burn coal, but the technology to get us to wind and solar — we need a bridge to get from here to whenever that would be.”
5. “We need to look to coal, we need to look to solar, we need to look to wind and water.”
6. “I think that we need to have the lowest possible rates. The economy the way it is today, hopefully the job loss from the Lower 48 isn’t going to hit us as hard as it has down there, but I’ve run into people who just can’t afford their Enstar and HEA bills and still eat. I really do believe we need to keep them down as low as possible. I’m not going to try to tell you I’m going to lower rates — that would be like the president saying I’m going to cut out all your taxes — that’s a lie. But I’m going to do everything I can to keep them as low as possible and still be sustainable.”
7. None.

Ed Oberts
1. “My first thought is that I would be very apprehensive to merge all the utilities, there’s different equity in each of them and the local control is important.”
2. “I’m supportive of renewables, but I think we have to realize our base load on the coldest day in the middle of winter, we’re not going to have any wind and there’s no sun. We’re going to have to rely on natural gas or coal.”
3. “I don’t know the details but I’m supportive of hydro power in general and suspect that I would be supportive of those projects.”
4. “Again, I don’t have the detailed knowledge on that issue, but I do support coal power generation. I think it’s an economically feasible resource that we need to take advantage of.”
5. “That’s the biggest question out there because it affects rates. Long-tem I think we need to work hard to find a good answer to that. If I get elected I’ll be working positively with all the other utilities around the state to address that issue and find a long-term, stable source of electric power for everybody.”
6. “I believe they need to be stabilized and lowered. My experience working at the borough for the borough mayor’s office, I have extensive knowledge of how to read and understand a budget. I think HEA’s a big organization and needs to have strong leadership at the board level to make sure that a good budget is adopted and adhered to so that we don’t incur expenses that are out of line and force our rates up.”
7. “I think the biggest issue out there is skyrocketing rates that they’re basically out of control, and the utility needs to address them and find a solution. This is my fourth time running for the HEA board. I really look forward to getting elected and representing the members of the association.”

Terry Johnson
1. “Yes, I support it. I think that’s one of things making our utilities so high, pretty much (Chugach) has us where they want us. They charge us obscene rates for our electricity. I think if it’s consolidated, I think it would help us.”
2. “Renewables up here are going to be tough. Those 60-foot blades on them wind generators. Everyone that you talk to says they’re an eyesore. I think there are places in Alaska where people could agree to put them, but right now the biggest problem is the storage. I think we have other ways to go right now.”
3. “It’s a good idea if it’s not cost prohibitive. I think a lot of it would have to do with the bids on what’s out there to build it. The other thing is the permitting, that’s going to be the hard one.”
4. “Yes, I think that that would be one of our best options if we could get a tie-in up there and burn our coal instead of sending it to, right now it’s going to Korea and other places. I think if we could burn our own coal here I think it would be better for the environment all around.”
5. “Everybody’s talking about the (natural gas) bullet line with the price of natural gas where it is and getting permits and being able to build the bullet line in a feasible amount of time. I think it’s going to be a real challenge. I think HEA has quite a few options open to them. I think HEA itself has a lot of costs they can reduce, but nobody seems to be in the cost-reducing mode.”
6. “The biggest thing is to get a low-cost power supply. … I believe coal is going to be one of our best options, being that the natural gas on the peninsula, the supplies are going down. … I think that’s a big one we’ll have to face is what can we do now to ensure power within the next five years?”
7. “(I don’t want to sound anti-growth, but) somewhere down the line it’s going to get where HEA has got to screen how much new growth can come into our community because there’s not enough electricity to go around. With Wal-Mart coming in, and if Pebble Mine gets built, our community now is at the point where, how do we let new businesses in when we can’t provide power for them?”

William Tappan
1. “I think that some kind of coming together and getting rates down for everyone is a good idea. The part I’m not sure about is whether or not it’s necessary — and it may be in the future, but not today — to eliminate or do away with the six Railbelt utilities and make them into one.”
2. “They don’t really add to the base load capacity to keep the lights on. What it does is it helps with peaking. … We must go to renewables. Here on the peninsula there are tons of options. … We have to evaluate the tradeoffs of the cost versus what we get for it.”
3. “The one at Grant Lake seems to be the most proactive and I do support it and I’m a big fly fisherman, by the way. I’m very pro-environment and pro-fishing.”
4. “I do, and the reason is that HEA is not going to own a coal-fired plant. We are only going to buy power. We need to diversify off of natural gas, and that is where that 200 years of coal supply is. Right now they’ve been running unit one cleanly, and I’m impressed with it. If and when they get unit two going, that’s when we will be buying power, which should theoretically be less cost to our ratepayers because coal should be cheaper than natural gas.”
5. “We may get into another deal with them and we may not. We won’t do it if it isn’t right for our members since it’s pre-negotiated. … If that greater Railbelt thing in some form goes forward, that issue may go away anyway.”
6. “I would like to see how (merging Railbelt utilities and creating one, “postage stamp” price for all members) that’s going to work. I would be for it if it’s going lower our rates. If it’s going to raise rates for our members, I’m not for it. We’re just not there yet. It’s a new notion.”
7. “Unity of the board. There is, and I’m not implying that there’s friction, but I think that we all need to have a plan and support the plan. There are a few who certainly are entitled to their views and opinions that don’t share the view of the majority right now. I think everybody wants what’s right for all the members but how we get there is an issue.”

District 3

Steve Franklin
1. “That’s a hard question to answer. I’m not really familiar with it. … I wouldn’t know why that wouldn’t be a good thing if it’s managed properly and handled correctly, I think everybody could gain from that.”
2. “I really think Homer Electric needs to take a real close look at the options and get into renewable sources just as fast and as quick as we can, and what we can afford. Certainly for renewable wind energy, solar, tidal, whatever it may be, I think we need to take a close look at it.”
3. “I do support it for the simple fact it is a renewable type of energy. It is something that we can count on, I think, for the only reason it’s not using fossil fuels. It is something that we can pull off of nature and utilize.”
4. “I think it would be a great partnership. If we can satisfy the environmental needs, keep it a clean coal-burning plant, I think that would be great. But I’m not sure we can afford it in today’s industry in Alaska, to meet all the necessary emissions. … I’m leaving my options open on that one.”
5. “We get back to renewable resources — wind, solar, whatever. … We need to have the energy that we control. We need to be in the saddle. We need to be in control of the energy that we receive and distribute, versus relying on someone else to make it work for us.”
6. “I’m not quite sure but I do think that the renewable energy is what the key is. It’s going to be a major investment, but I think in the long term that’s the best way to go. As long as we’re relying on another entity to supply us with the energy like it is today, it’s very difficult to stabilize it because of the demands and of the increases and decreases of fossil fuels.”
7. “The only priority I have is to speak for the membership. My personal views are the bottom of the priority list. My number one priority is to listen to the members and do what the members want. I may not always agree with it, but if the body as a whole wishes it to go a certain direction, that’s the direction I will vote on.”

Jim Levine
1. “I guess in concept I support it. It seems like a pretty good idea as long as we get what I consider to be the right kind of energy mix, which would be a lot more renewables than what we’re doing right now. I guess I wouldn’t support it if it’s going to be more of the same, more coal and what not. I think it would be economical to have all the utilities joined together, there’s obviously some kind of economy of scale.”
2. “I’m highly in favor of them. I think it’s really the wave of the future. … Solar, wind and the ocean, we have so much potential down here for those types of energy power generation. … A lot of different systems are up and running and ready to be used around the world.”
3. “In general I think that hydropower’s a good thing. It needs to be taken on a case-by-case basis. Obviously whenever you dam a waterway there’s always going be some conflict, so you need to be really careful in that respect.”
4. “I don’t think that they know all the costs involved, so I don’t think that it’s a wise move. I don’t think they should get involved for 50 years. … The Healy plant in particular has never been operated successfully yet. I don’t have any idea what it will cost to operate successfully, if they even can. I think renewable is a much better way to go and trying to go to a coal facility is just sort of looking backwards instead of forward.”
5. “I think a temporary solution would be just to continue with the natural gas system. I think natural gas is a more, I don’t know, earth-friendly means of supplying power in the meantime, until we can get renewable systems online and operating.”
6. “I think moving toward renewables will start to stabilize the rates because there’s no fuel costs once you get these systems up and running. On a more short-term basis, we just need to kind of watch our pennies and see what we can do to keep the costs in line while we’re developing these other systems.”
7. “I would like to see a much more open and transparent type of board meetings where you invite the co-op members to participate, rather than, from what I can see, consider them to be kind of a problem to get around.”

Pete Roberts
1. “Well, I don’t support Enron and that’s how I see it. The economies of scale idea is completely blown out of shape. … There’s no way you could combine these co-ops without taking them into the state or private industry, and I believe HEA is trying to privatize itself.”
2. “If they’re economical I think it’s a great idea. HEA historically does not like renweables, contrary to SNAP, which is bulls---. I like renewables, I think it’s a great idea. I want to know why don’t we have more than 12 percent of the power from Bradley Lake for the peninsula. Actually, I know why — it was purely legislative and politics.”
3. “I’m generally favorable but want to see more details. I start to hear the issue about salmon, but salmon are brought up to knock down everything in this state and we have got to have a balance. If they’re not going to make a significant, say 10 percent, cut in the salmon, I think we need to set that aside because we have other things that are important on this peninsula.”
4. “Whether or not coal power is good or bad is besides the point. You never buy into something where the title is clouded and the management of it is also clouded. That’s been the situation with MEA and the state and we shouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole.”
5. “We need to drill gas wells. HEA needs to contract for gas wells and can put a generator on the top of each one of them. It’s cheaper than sending it through a pipe. We’re in trouble because we haven’t acted as a G and T (generation and transmission), just a transmission utility. We do have a little generation ability but we need to hire the expertise.”
6. “They have to plan ahead. They have all sorts of capital credit money that can be used to balance out the fluctuations between the cost of energy and what it is. What happened with the December, January, February deals was uncalled for for a member-owned co-op. I think the members need to take co-op back from the industrial people who would privatize it and don’t give a damn about their customers.”
7. “The policies that affect the owner member, the customers. The policies need to be reviewed and checked and modified for the benefit of the owner member. I want the co-op back for the cooperative.”

Don Seelinger
1. It’s difficult to take a position on the governor’s proposal when it is still a moving target. I have reviewed the draft proposal dated Feb 11, 2009. I’ve reviewed SB143 and HB182 and have been monitoring the continuing discussions. That said, I could support a unified transmission grid by which there would be a postage stamp rate for wheeling, thereby standardizing the rate for wheeling for all utilities. In some cases this could lead to a significant savings.
2. Renewables must be an important part of HEA’s generation portfolio. I propose that we take renewables to the maximum the system will allow as long as it does not negatively impact rates.
3. Until the studies have been completed, thereby providing us all the data we would need, I have not taken a position on the low impact hydro projects. However, I cannot support any hydro projects that would significantly impact water quality or fish habitat.
4. With regard to HEA’s involvement with the Healy Coal facility, I need to clarify involvement. If by involvement are you asking, do I support HEA being an owner of the facility in part or in whole?, or have an obligation for the start-up of the plant? This I am not in support of. However, I do support HEA’s position of first right of refusal to purchase up to 27 megawatts of power from (Golden Valley Electric Association). If there is an acceptable contract for such a purchase, that is in the best interests of HEA’s members, then I could support it. As of this date, no proposed contract has come before the board for consideration.
5. The stage has been set, the wheels are in motion, the potential sites have been selected to assure HEA has the required generation available by 2014. This will be accomplished by a portfolio that reflects present generation technology and renewables. It may also require, but has yet to be determined, a contract/purchase spinning reserves. The power sales agreement between HEA/(Chugach) is a take or pay contract.
6. I refer you to my answer in #1, and also by HEA becoming a diversified, independent power provider with its own dispatch. These are big ticket items, but I will continue to look for opportunities for cost savings thereby stabilizing rates. Bringing generation and dispatch to the peninsula will mean jobs.
7. None.
Editor’s note: Seelinger composed and e-mailed his comments, rather than participating in an interview as all other candidates did. All grammar and punctuation is printed verbatim, except for parenthetical references added for clarity.

Doug Stark
1. “It would increase efficiency. The estimate is it would be $40 million a year, because most of the utilities at this time are getting ready to build additional generation. Those would be small projects compared to what the giant co-op for transmission and energy production could do.”
2. “I’m very much in favor of them. They’re not going to solve the problem within the next 10 years. They’re certainly the way to go in the interim.”
3. “I’m not that familiar with them. In general I’m in favor with most hydro projects. I would have to have more information before I could say definitely. In a hydro project, there’s always pluses and minuses, mostly dealing with fish on the minus side, and with what the hydro does, is it controls the stream flow, and that makes people nervous.”
4. “The federal government and the state put more than $100 million into it. I think it’s just really sort of obscene the thing has sat there for close to 20 years. I think it’s got to be brought online so it isn’t just a wasted resource. You’ve got to remember that that’s a clean coal facility. That isn’t just a coal-fired power plant. That was designed and a lot of money was put into that to make it a facility that would burn coal cleanly.”
5. “I think what we should do is go into the proposal that the governor is pushing, which will resolve that question.”
6. “I don’t have the information to answer that right now. There’s a lot of stuff going on internally and I understand some of it’s pretty volatile. One thing I would believe in is a little more sunshine and transparency. Springing these rate increases on people, this is a co-op, remember, it’s supposed to be owned by members. I think springing 40 percent increases on members with no notice is absolutely beyond the pale.”
7. “I’ve got some ideas that HEA can do that would help members. I don’t think they’re big deals, but one or both have been done by other electric utilities, is set up a program for reduced cost for buying florescent lightbulbs. The other is to set up a program for funding through local improvement districts the provision of lines for supplying gas to homes when the gas line comes down to the south peninsula.”

Editorial: Shedding light on HEA elections

2009-04-07T23:27:00.000-08:00

These are electric times. The Homer Electric Association Board of Directors has always served an important function on the central and southern Kenai Peninsula, but one that hasn’t always garnered much attention from HEA members. Come annual election time, picking names and returning ballots for some voters is fueled more by a desire to qualify for energy credits than it is a concern over the politics and policies of the co-op.

It’s not that who gets elected doesn’t matter, it’s just that voters haven’t had much incentive to take time out of their busy lives to familiarize themselves with the issues facing the HEA board and the views of those seeking seats on it.

Until now. This past year’s dramatic increase in electricity rates has had one positive side effect: It gets people’s attention.

And just in time. The board will soon face decisions of monumental and fundamental importance to how HEA operates in the future. Such basic questions as:

Where will HEA get power? Should it continue contracting for the majority of its electricity from natural gas? Is that even an option with reserves dwindling and prices climbing?

Should HEA invest in developing renewable energy sources? If so, which ones, where and to what scale?

What about coal? Do affordability and abundance factors outweigh environmental concerns? How long and to what level should HEA commit to the Healy coal plant?

What if Pebble Mine gets the go-ahead? Will HEA be involved in providing the massive amount of power the operation will require? If so, how?

Should HEA support joining forces with other Railbelt electric utilities for generation and transportation purposes? Should a single, “postage-stamp” rate be established for the entire Railbelt?

The answers to all these questions will have an impact on pocketbooks. So now’s the time to think about answers. Read up on the issues and candidates’ stances on them. Talk to current and hopeful board members. Visit with neighbors and friends about their priorities. And most importantly, don’t think casting a vote is the end of it. Several candidates stated they want to carry out the will of their constituents. So stay informed, involved and vocal. If board members don’t know what residents want, they can’t advocate it.

Pay attention now, or pay for it later.

Arts and Entertainment week of April 8

2009-04-07T23:25:00.001-08:00

Events:

Ongoing

Artists Without Borders in the 4D Building in Soldotna has “Unhinged,” works done on a door or window, in conjunction with a group show by local artists, through April.
Art Works in Soldotna has egg tempera paintings by Andy Hehnlin on display.
The Funky Monkey in Kenai has photography by Tony Lewis on display through April.
Kaladi Brothers on Kobuk Street in Soldotna has “This Season That We Call Winter,” a photography exhibition by Genevieve Klebba, on display.
Kaladi Brothers on the Sterling Highway in Soldotna has artwork by Melody Lee Gleichman on display through April.
The Kenai Fine Arts Center in Old Town Kenai has the Kenai Peninsula School District visual arts celebration with work by ninth- through 12th-graders on display through April.
The Soldotna Senior Center is looking for artists to display their work in the center's lobby. Shows are one month long. Artwork must hang on the walls. Call Mary Lane at 262-8839. The artist of the month for April is Jan Wallace.

Friday

Curtain Call Consignment Boutique is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Kenai Performers’ Old Town Playhouse in Kenai. Organizers are taking consignments of new or gently used namebrand and designer clothing, handbags, shoes, jewelry and accessories. Contact Mary Krull at 398-2931.
“8 Stars of Comedy Gold,” a comedic play about Alaska history, will be performed by Sidecar, an improvisational acting troupe from New York City, at 7 p.m. at Triumvirate Theatre in the Peninsula Center Mall in Soldotna. Tickets are $7 for adults, $3 for kids, available at the Triumvirate Bookstore and at the door. For more information, visit www.triumviratetheatre.org.

Saturday

Curtain Call Consignment Boutique is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Kenai Performers’ Old Town Playhouse in Kenai. See Friday listing.
“8 Stars of Comedy Gold” will be performed at 7 p.m. at Triumvirate Theatre in Soldotna. See Friday listing.

Coming up

Kenai Performers will present “Sudden Theatre,” an evening of 10-minute plays, at 7 p.m. April 17, 18, 24 and 25 and 3 p.m. April 19 and 26 at the Old Town Playhouse in Kenai. Admission is $12 for adults and $10 for students and seniors. Advance tickets are available at Charlotte’s in Kenai and River City Books in Soldotna. The show is PG-13.
A concert fundraiser will be held from 5 to 9 p.m. April 18 at College Heights Baptist Church to benefit Isaiah James Charlie, who was born with a heart defect and needs medial care. There will be live music, a spaghetti dinner, auctions for guided fishing trips, a Grant Aviation voucher and more. Contact Kristi Bradford, 394-8224.
The BYU Idaho Collegiate Singers will perform “We Are All Children” at 7 p.m. April 21 in the Renee C. Henderson Auditorium at Kenai Central High School. Admission is a donation of canned goods for the Kenai Peninsula Food Bank.
Sterling Elementary School will hold an opening for its annual art show from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. April 23. It will remain on display until 11:00 a.m. April 24. This year’s show is dedicated to the memory of Roy Shapley, a third-grade teacher at the school and local photographer and artist, who died in December. The show will include student work as well as Shapley’s photography, literary art and storytelling art, and pieces donated by professional artists in the area. The school is also holding a fundraiser for Roy’s family through the raffle of more than 20 pieces of fine art donated by celebrated professional artists in the community. For more information, contact Principal Christine Ermold at cermold@kpbsd.k12.ak.us or 262-4944.

Nightlife:

Friday and Saturday nights at The Riverside.

Live music

The Clam Shell in Clam Gulch will have music by Butch Leman at 9 p.m. Saturday.
Hooligan’s Saloon in Soldotna has a jam night Thursday and live music on Friday and Saturday nights.
The Maverick in Soldotna has the Free Beer Band on Sundays.
Moosequito’s in Sterling has AK Free Fuel on Friday night.
The Place in Nikiski has bluegrass by Them Other Shuckers on Friday nights around 7:30 p.m.
The Rainbow Bar in Kenai has live music by The Mabrey Brothers at 10 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
The Vagabond on Kalifornsky Beach Road has a jam session April 17.
Veronica’s in Kenai has the Old Believers on Friday night and George Navarre and Nancy Anderson from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Saturday.

Karaoke

9 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at the Duck Inn on Kalifornsky Beach Road.
9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays at the .406 in Kenai.
9:30 p.m. Wednesdays at Hooligan’s in Soldotna.
9 p.m. Fridays at J-Bar-B outside Soldotna.
9:30 p.m. Mondays at the Maverick in Soldotna.

Events

Hooligan’s in Soldotna has Texas Hold ‘Em poker at 5 and 8 p.m. Tuesdays, and a cutest bunny contest Saturday night.
The Maverick in Soldotna has a pool tournament at 8 p.m. Fridays.
Moosequito’s in Sterling has darts Tuesday night.

Bound to be fun — Book group has been together nearly 20 years

2009-04-07T23:23:00.001-08:00

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

There are readers and then there are readers.

The former pack a book for a plane ride. They skim through the paper in the morning. They end the day with a chapter or two before turning out the light.

For the latter, anytime their eyes and hands aren’t immediately occupied doing something else, they’re glued to a page. If they’re not reading, they’re thinking about what they’ve been reading, or planning what to read next. For those, the only thing worse than having nothing to read is having no one to share what they’re reading with.

That’s where book groups come in.

“You just get jived, you know, when you love to read,” said Rosie Reeder, who recently taught a class for Soldotna Community Schools on how to form a book group. “How you read a book and think, ‘Man, I’d love to talk to somebody about it.’

“I have friends who say, ‘How can you be so excited about a book?’ Hey, my name is Reeder. It’s kind of spelled out that I do these things.”

Reeder and the seven-woman book group she’s part of, literally called THE Book Group — “I feel a little like ‘Who’s On First?’ when I say it,” Reeder said — have been meeting “for about 18 years, or some ridiculous thing. I put it in my appointment book. I just hate to miss it.”

The group, Marge Hays, Sammy Crawford, Lois Pillifant, Susan Jelsma, Sherril Miller, Reeder and Peggy Toppenberg, meets every Wednesday morning for about an hour and has become so entrenched in members’ lives they’ve even managed the seemingly impossible — maintaining regular meetings in the summer, albeit on a reduced schedule of once a month.

And these aren’t even the best of friends, desperate for a reason to get together and chat. They’ve know each other for differing numbers of years and interact in various professional, community, philanthropic and social realms, but other than their book group, they probably wouldn’t all get together as regularly as they do, if at all. And that’s good, Reeder said.

“I’ve found that best friends are not necessarily the best way to do it because you tend to talk about some pretty heavy stuff and you’re too busy visiting,” she said.
Just discussing the books leaves plenty to talk about. In part, that’s due to the members’ personalities.

“We’re all kind of type A personalities. We try to give turns, but we’re not very good at it, to be perfectly honest,” Reeder said. “We try to honor each other and try and take turns.”

“The other thing is they have to be skilled at interruptions, obviously, because we all talk at the same time,” Pillifant said.

On April 1, the group was discussing “Exile,” by Richard North Patterson, a thriller set amid the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The group rarely reads novels, preferring nonfiction, especially biographies and the like.

“Our basic thing is we like to learn from what we read,” Reeder said.

The novel is set in real context, which fit the bill as informative. As usual, not everyone was in agreement over specific elements of the book, much less whether they enjoyed it overall.

But that’s half the fun of the discussion.

“I can’t believe that she even went in the first place. Oh lady, what were you thinking?” Hays said, reiterating her take on one of the book’s main characters.
“Oh, here you go again,” Reeder said.

“Some of the books we read, I would not read, and I wouldn’t have read a chapter of this unless you told me too,” Pillifant said.

“But that’s good for us. One thing I like about a book club is it sure expands what you read,” Hays said.

THE Book Group started with Hays and Reeder. The two got talking about their mutual love of books before a college class one day, and said they’d both always wanted to be in a book group.

“Marge said, ‘Well, you know we could start one.’ And I said, ‘Oh, that would be cool.’ Next week I came back she said, ‘Did you get some people?’ I said, ‘Oh, I thought you were kidding,’” Reeder said.

The group’s membership and numbers have fluctuated over the years, but they finally hit on a makeup that works for them: Seven women, amiable but not superclose friends, who love to read to learn and are willing to speak up about it.

“In book group it’s so cool relating something and somebody else will say, ‘I don’t remember it being that funny,’ or that whatever, and you realize it’s the way you read it, so that’s a whole new perspective,” Reeder said.

They occasionally get inquiries from people looking to join a group, but they don’t want more than seven. Yet filling their last opening took some time to find someone who fit well into the group, could meet at the scheduled time and was interested in mostly nonfiction books.

“It took forever for us to find someone and to make the decision, and they turned us down,” Hays said. “We were so sure everyone wanted to join our group. We had to have a moment of silence.”

With this group, the silence probably didn’t last long.

Writing rules for reading

Rosie Reeder, who has participated in a book group for about 18 years, has fielded questions over the years from kindred bibliophiles looking to join or start a book group.

It’s a great activity, but just like some books take effort to get into them, forming a cohesive, consistent group can take patience and persistence, she said.
Here are her tips for forming a book group:

Decide how many and what types of people you want. For numbers, three aren’t enough, because it’s hard to have a good discussion if someone doesn’t show, and 10 are too many because it’s hard for everyone to get a chance to talk. As for types of people, Reeder advises against close friends, because it’s too easy to talk about everything but the book. On the other hand, having people who are extremely dissimilar can cause more friction in discussions than some members may want to endure.

Decide logistics. Where will you meet? How often? What time? For how long? How long will you take to read a book? Are kids allowed? Will there be food, coffee, wine? If so, who’s bringing or preparing it?

Some things to keep in mind: Restaurants can be fun, but also expensive, and wait staff may not want a large, possibly loud group taking up a table for hours on end. But if it’s at a home, you don’t want hosting responsibilities to become disruptive or burdensome.

“If it’s at your house, well I have a family and a life and you’re going to come here every week for four hours on the weekend? I don’t think so,” Reeder said.

“We meet at my house, and I don’t have anything except coffee or tea water. If gets to be a drudge, you’re not going to do it for 18 years,” she said.
Decide what type of books you’ll read.

“The type of books you read, I think, has lot to do with it,” Reeder said. “If you want to meet five or six times and be done, it doesn’t matter. But you really need to have some commonalities, like we read almost all nonfiction and we read a book in about a month. You really need to pick something that holds your interest. We have a hard time with a romance book or a novel, because what are you going to talk about? ‘Did you think he did it?’ ‘Yeah, he did it.’ Then you’re done.”

Decide how you’ll get books. Buying even one book a month can get expensive, but local libraries don’t usually have enough copies for everyone in a book group to read the same thing at the same time.

“That’s huge. You could really spend a lot of money if you end up buying them, and you don’t want to steal them, so you have to figure something out,” Reeder said.

Reeder recommends combining a variety of approaches — including libraries, checking with River City Books about a discount for book groups, shopping at used book stores, shopping online, trading off books with other book groups, borrowing from friends and taking advantage of the Anchorage Public Library’s Book Club Bags, where the library will lend out and ship batches of about 10 books for six weeks at a time.

Sweet dreams: Author wants to share family tales with other kids

2009-04-07T23:22:00.002-08:00

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Ken Covey, of Soldotna, may find it a little odd to tell his stories to a group of wide-awake kids, since his tales came about as bedtime stories told to his six children, then 15 grandchildren, over the past 40 years.

He’s scheduled to do a book talk and reading of his book, “The Adventures of a Little Boy Named Kenny,” at 1 p.m. April 18 at the Triumvirate Theatre Bookstore in the Peninsula Center Mall in Soldotna. His grandson, Josh Lofquist, a senior at Nikiski High School, will be there to talk about illustrating the book, as well.

Covey wrote the book before Christmas this winter and had it self-published at the urging of his family.

“It’s a compilation of stories that I’ve been telling my kids and grandkids ever since they were small, starting out with the older kids in the 40s now,” Covey said. “As they grew older they wanted them to be recorded so they weren’t lost, so they encouraged me to write them down. And my wife, too, she’s one of the instigators.”

The stories are of young Kenny and the adventures — or misadventures — he gets into growing up in the mountains of Colorado, whether it’s accidentally stowing away on a train in an effort to find out where the tracks by his house go, or building a homemade “hootenanny” go-cart that has no end of go, but is a little short on stop.

The tales are drawn from Covey’s own childhood experiences and they’ve changed somewhat over the years depending on who he’s telling them to and what he wants to get across with the stories.

Each tale can be read in 10 or 15 minutes, and contains a lesson along with the adventure.

“I hope there’s a little wisdom in there, and a little bit of teaching. I guess a moral might be the way to say it. Every story has a moral of what he should or shouldn’t have done, or could or couldn’t have done or whatever. When I was telling the stories to my kids they were designed not only just to entertain them, but also to instruct them about how actions have consequences and how you should think through things before doing them and not just jump into things before thinking,” Covey said.

Covey hasn’t published anything before, but he’s done writing in college while getting his bachelor’s degree in education, and he’s written stories and poems “for my own amusement,” he said.

“My degree is in education and I was a pastor of a church for several years, so I’m a communicator, I guess you might say. Or try to be, anyway,” Covey said.
One of the biggest challenges was switching communication modes — changing oral stories to written ones.

“I’m not sure that they came out the same way they were told. Translating them to the page was difficult. You can’t use hand gestures and facial expressions and voice inflection and all that sort of thing to tell a story in a book, so the language had to be more colorful, I guess,” Covey said. “Actually, it was easy to write the stories, it was hard to get them to sound right on paper — a lot of changing of words and using a word wrench to get the right phrases in there, and the punctuation all had to be in there, which you don’t think about when you’re telling a story.”

Covey also had to break “one of his sacred convictions that adults cannot hear a Kenny story,” he wrote in the forward to the book. “This is one of the things that has endeared the stories to the kids, because they exist in a secret place where adults cannot enter and where one little boy is the center and hero of his world.”
It was a sacrifice he was willing to make in this and his future planned Kenny books, in order to share the stories with more kids.

“Of course, I like kids. We have six of our own and all our grandkids. Kids are special and need all the help they can get,” he said.

The book talk and reading will be part of the formation of a book group for kids, probably at a fourth-grade reading level and up, said Rosie Reeder, coordinator of the Triumvirate Bookstore. The first meeting will be at the bookstore, then may move to the Soldotna library. Reeder expects the group will meet once every three or four weeks and read a book a month.

The book group is open to anyone, and Reeder is seeking sponsors to help defray the costs of purchasing books for the kids to read.

For more information, contact Reeder at 262-2908.

For more information on Covey’s book, visit www.outskirtspress.com/adventuresofkenny. It is available for purchase at River City Books, Triumvirate Bookstore and online at www.amazon.com, www.barnsandnoble.com and www.borders.com.

Wild catch — Fisherman in the middle of bear-shark tug-of-war

2009-04-07T23:20:00.001-08:00

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

Commercial fisherman Bill Holt thought the shark was bad enough — and then the bear came along.

Holt later admitted he was somewhat amused by what transpired next, but mostly he was just irritated because he was losing precious fishing time.

In a world of 12-hour openings and limited resources, Holt didn’t appreciate wasting minutes when he could be netting salmon and making money.

“That’s the one thing about commercial fishing,” he said. “You can never rest on your laurels. As soon as something goes wrong, you’ve gotta be thinking about the next place to go because you have such a small window of opportunity to make it.”

Holt’s notions about taking advantage of limited time have been honed by years of experience. He has been drift fishing Cook Inlet for about 30 years. For nearly 20 of those years he fished the east side until the runs petered out, and then motored across to the west side to extend his season.

Typically, in mid- to late August, he would enter Chinitna Bay, just south of Mount Iliamna, to take advantage of the runs of silver salmon entering the streams there to spawn. At the head of the bay, he might jockey for position with other boats trying to corral schools of salmon headed for Clear Creek, but he preferred the more sedate opportunities along the bay’s northern shore, particularly in tiny Clam Cove, when the weather and the tides were right.

Holt, a local school board member who is the chief caretaker of the Tsalteshi Trails behind Skyview High School, entered Clam Cove one morning in August 1995 and set about preparing to fish the outgoing tide, as he had done many times before.

As water leaves the cove and enters the bay during an ebb tide, it is swept west to east toward the mouth of the bay and open inlet. So Holt fished the cove’s east-side beach, cognizant of the need to keep his fishing vessel inside the cove and not drift into the main tidal current, where it could be pulled eastward and trail his nets into the rocks on the point of the cove.

On this particular morning, Holt backed up his boat — a 34-foot fiberglass vessel named the Loujon — as close as he could to the sandy beach and dropped his 40-inch bright orange buoy right at the water’s edge. Fishing regulations state that a buoy, which marks the far end of a fisherman’s net, must be in the water at all times. Holt likes to tie his buoy close to the end of his net and place it just offshore to prevent salmon from skirting his mesh on that side.

He said he is careful not to place the buoy actually on the shore because he is “paranoid” about breaking the law and bringing down the wrath of fish cops. As the tide ebbs, he keeps enough tension on the boat end of the net to prevent the buoy from going dry.

“We always heard these stories about (former Fish and Game wardens) Dan France and Al Thompson, that they would be over there and they would hide in hollow tree trunks,” he said. “Whether that was true or not, I don’t know, but we always lived in fear of that.”

After dropping the buoy, he and his crew — his 12-year-old son, Galen, and a college graduate named Maggie, who was set to enter Harvard Medical School later that fall and had never fished commercially before — began feeding out the net in a series of small S-turns that Holt likes to call “lollygags.” The lollygags give him handling flexibility with a net three shackles (900 feet) long, and the turns in the net sometimes confound the fish and cause them to become more easily trapped.

“We were catching some fish,” Holt said. “And as the tide started leaving, I had to start pulling harder offshore. So pretty soon, essentially, I sort of had a straight net.

“And so we’re fishing, fishing, fishing — and all of a sudden the (first shackle of) net just goes completely underwater and starts thrashing around.”

The net began to bow outward slightly south toward open water.

“When I first saw it happen, my first thought was we’d just seen killer whales that morning going up the bay. But then I realized, no way; I would’ve seen them. The boat was in only 6 or 7 feet of water.

“And then we saw that it was a shark. You could see its ugly old shark nose and all that stuff. It went back down and started thrashing around.”

The salmon shark, which Holt estimated at 8 to 10 feet long and 250 to 300 pounds, became so entangled in the mesh that it could not escape. Holt’s crew was “pretty excited,” he said, but he was becoming concerned.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh, man, here we go. It’s gonna wreck the net. It’s obviously gonna wreck the net.’ And I knew that to pull back and get the shark out would cause the buoy to pull too far offshore and then I’d have too much current.”

Then, as if the situation wasn’t bad enough, out of the mix of alders and spruce at the margin formed by the beach and the woods, came a large black bear that ambled down the incline to the water’s edge, apparently drawn by the jerking motions of the buoy.

“It just sat there like you’re sitting on a stool or a chair, sat there watching the buoy. Ten feet away from this buoy, just sitting there watching it.”

The bear didn’t sit still very long. Intrigued or irritated by the movement, it returned to all fours, walked determinedly down to the buoy, grabbed it with both paws, and bit it.

“Then it takes the buoy and starts backing up the beach with it. He pulled it up the beach a little ways to where it was actually on the sand. So he’s actually helping me fish,” Holt said. “And then he dropped the buoy, walked away and sat there, watching.

“And the shark’s still going at it, and pretty soon it starts pulling back off the beach again. Pretty soon the buoy’s back out in the water, so the bear comes down and grabs the buoy again and pulls it back up on the beach. And I think this happened three times.

“It was like a shark and a bear playing tug-of-war with each other, and I’m in there, too, trying to mediate the whole thing. Eventually, the bear quit pulling up, and the shark kept screwing around, and in order to keep things straight I ended up catching some current.”

As the bear disappeared back into the woods, Holt was forced to motor out into the current and around the point to steer clear of the rocks. As he drifted eastward, he used a hydraulic gillnet drum to winch in the net until the shark was free of the water. Once he had slashed at the net enough to liberate the shark, he was able to bring in the rest of the net and pick the fish he had caught. He was delighted to see that, despite his double predator seesaw struggles, he had 100 to 150 silvers in his hold.

The morning wasn’t off to such a bad start, after all.

But, as a true fisherman knows, time spent contemplating one’s fortunes or misfortunes is time lost, so Holt prepared to fish again. “By the time I got the net back in, I’d forgotten all about the incident and I was already trying to think about someplace else to go fish. And I was upset because this thing had taken some time out of my fishing day.

“We only needed two shackles of gear there, anyway,” he added. “What I did was cut all the floppy net out and restart the set. When you’re fishing, you don’t ever give up.”

Sliding into spring — Avalanche hazard in Turnagain Pass

2009-04-07T23:13:00.001-08:00

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Snowmachiners, backcountry skiers and climbers beware: the January hurricane crust could come back to bury you.

That’s the message from Carl Skustad, with the Chugach National Forest Avalanche Information Center. The center issued an advisory of extreme avalanche danger in the Turnagain Pass area on Friday.

“The current hazard is out there due to the large amounts of new snow. We’ve actually gotten about one-third of our total snow in the last three weeks, and that is sitting on top of a weak layer that was formed mid-January,” Skustad said Friday.

Conditions formed what Skustad calls a hurricane crust. Winds gusting up to 120 mph on ridge tops and rain up to 3,000 feet in January created an icy layer on top of the snowpack. Subsequent snowfalls, which have gotten heavier as temperatures warm, are sitting on top of that slick surface.

“Now we’ve reached this point where there’s this much stress on top of a weak layer and it’s exceeding the strength of this weak layer. That’s why any additional load could tip the balance, or any skier or snowmobile or climber,” Skustad said.

In these conditions, a slide could be triggered by as little as the warming rays of the sun. On steep slopes, any snowmachining, skiing, climbing or snowshoeing could trigger an avalanche, and risky activities like high marking pose a distinct threat.

“No, that’s definitely not a good idea right now,” Skustad said.

Most avalanches happen on slopes with a 38-degree or higher angle.

“But that’s just another indication of how tender our snowpack is now, that we’re seeing avalanches as low as 25 degrees,” Skustad said.

“I do not have a good feeling for the rest of the season,” he said. “We’re in April, so, really, we’re looking at a month. Once the snowpack has a chance to go through the whole avalanche cycle, which it does every spring, and it gets to what is called isothermal — when the snowpack is all the same temperature. Past that we’re golden, but until that point this weak layer will live under there.”

The hazard was issued for the Turnagain Arm area, but Skustad cautions that the same conditions probably exist throughout the highway backcountry corridor.

“It’s confirmed all the way through Summit Lake, and I expect all the way into the Lost Lake area. There’s nothing to think that it’s not at Lost Lake. I think it’s safe to assume this hazard does exist all the way down to there,” he said.

The death of 35-year-old Yancy Flair, of Anchorage, who was buried in a slide in Johnson Pass while snowmachining March 28, and a slide that closed the Seward Highway between Girdwood and Portage on March 27 has punctuated the avalanche danger in the Turnagain Arm region recently. It took searchers until Saturday to recover Flair’s body.

Skustad said conditions are hazardous, but not extremely unusual.

“It’s something that we can expect every few years. It’s the persistent weak layer that happens midwinter that determines how significant our spring instability is going to be. We had a couple really large events midwinter that have now come back to haunt us in the snowpack,” he said.

That doesn’t mean the mountains should be off-limits, just approached with caution and the proper gear — including avalanche beacons.

“I always tell people they should go out and recreate out of doors somehow. You need to keep the slope angle low and have experience, or travel with someone who has experience with avalanche awareness,” Skustad said.

Science of the Seasons: Stone cold crazy in love

2009-04-07T23:12:00.000-08:00

It snowed again this week and spring seems to have been put off again. After a long winter, many of us are ready to see a color change from pure white snow (perhaps with a little gray volcanic ash as an accent) to the shades of green that spring offers.

Various trees are showing bulging catkins that are preparing to pop open, and swelling leaf buds will soon give rise to the next generation of leaves. A postponement of what we think of as spring may occur, but changes are ongoing in the streams, whether we know it or not.

If we could see underneath the ice cover of streams and rivers today, there are subtle changes happening. A fair number of aquatic insects have been feeding and growing during the winter months, and some will emerge as adults within a couple weeks. One of the early emerging insects from the Kenai River is a group of small stoneflies (Plecopterans), commonly called winter flies or winter stoneflies. They get these names because they can often be seen crawling on the snow and ice in the late winter or early spring.

Two weeks from now there will be thousands of tiny black, Capnidae stoneflies emerging from gravel substrate areas. If you happen to walk along the river, perhaps near Slikok Creek, every large rock along the stream edge will be crawling with slender, half-inch long stonefly adults. A close examination will reveal that these little insects have transparent wings folded flat on their backs, indicating they are in fact adults and no longer nymphs.

They aren’t very strong fliers so they prefer to crawl. You’ll find them crawling all over you if you sit down for any length of time or even stand still for a few seconds. They do not feed as adults and will see you as a tall, drumming platform and a possible place to find a mate. One might argue that they are “looking for love in all the wrong places,” but there will be lots of them using you as their personal dating service.

In some years the Kenai River ice cover has been melted away by now. This year it seems that the ice cover could remain intact during their chosen emergence period; but that will not deter their massive emergence. Most of these insects use light duration as their “zeitgeber” or timing cue, and they don’t really care if there is still ice cover or not.

Hidden from our view are air-filled spaces beneath the ice because of lowering river levels. There are lots of exposed rocks or even ice surfaces for the insects to use as an emergence platform. Winter stoneflies can emerge underneath the ice cover, find a mate, lay eggs and die, all hidden from the gaze of curious entomologists or insect predators.

For shortlived aquatic insects, and these stoneflies might only survive for two weeks, synchronous emergence of the entire population is important. By having most members of the population becoming an aerial insect at the same time, there is a high likelihood of everyone finding a mate. Since they are emerging early in the spring, very few avian predators are around to disrupt their party.

Along the Kenai River, various shore birds, like lesser yellowlegs, will work the shoreline, feeding on as many stoneflies as they can, but they cannot eat them all. These winter stoneflies will emerge by the tens of thousands so the predators that do appear will soon become satiated. The surviving flies will be able to complete their reproductive duties.

Because of a diverse number of microhabitats in the Kenai River, there are a fair number of different species of stoneflies. This species diversity probably comes from the variety of possible food sources available for stoneflies. Many, like the winter stoneflies we’ll be seeing in a few weeks, are leaf shredders. They feed on leaves, mostly those from riparian trees that are infested with nutrient-rich bacteria and fungi. The nymphs (immature stoneflies) chop the leaves into fine fragments and pass them through their gut. Because their guts are relatively inefficient — they can only extract about 5 percent of the nutrients they take in — they process a lot of leaves. Now you know why we don’t find many leaves in the river after the ice melts.

Another guild of stoneflies are active predators on smaller aquatic insects. These predators target the most abundant stream insects, the midge larvae and young mayflies. Some stoneflies combine the two lifestyles by starting their nymphal careers as a detritivore but slowly change into omnivores and eventually become predators.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects about many stoneflies is their novel approach to finding a mate. The males will crawl into a nearby shrub or tree and begin to “drum” on the limb with their abdomen. A receptive female, upon sensing the drumming, will answer with her own abdomen tapping and crawl toward the male virtuoso. Eventually the male will find the responding female and they mate. Each stonefly species uses a unique drumming cadence so inappropriate species are not attracted. Eggs are then laid on the stream surface or along the shoreline on submerged structures like a rock or tree limb. Soon stonefly nymphs hatch out and start the yearly cycle again.

David Wartinbee, Ph.D, J.D., is a biology professor at Kenai Peninsula College’s Kenai River Campus. He is writing a series of columns on the ecology of the Kenai River watershed.

Plugged In: Speeding up PCs doesn’t have to empty out wallets

2009-04-07T23:09:00.001-08:00

This week, I’d like to discuss the last few cost-effective computer upgrades. Some of these upgrades, such as CPU and system board replacements, are more likely to require the services of an experienced local technician to actually implement them.

CD/DVD drives. Modern CD and DVD drives are inexpensive and faster than earlier drives. I’ve bought good-quality Sony CD/DVD drives for as little as $20 to $40. This is an easy and worthwhile upgrade. Remove both side panels and unplug the power and ribbon cables, noting the correct orientation for later reassembly. Unscrew the four screws attaching the drive to the case, slide out the old drive through the front panel and slide in the new drive from the front panel. Reattach screws, power plug and data cable.

Upgrading CPU processors and system boards. I usually don’t recommend that an inexperienced home user upgrade either the CPU processor or the system board even though they can be a worthwhile upgrade. Unless you have prior experience replacing a CPU, there is a very good chance that you will permanently damage this expensive but fragile component. A professional technician can usually do the upgrade in a fairly short time.

The most cost-effective CPU upgrade would be one in which you substitute a significantly faster version of the same processor type. Usually, the most economical and beneficial approach involves replacing an entry-level CPU with a later, faster version of the same product line, installing additional cooling as needed. I believe the best cost-performance ratio is usually found in CPUs that are one speed grade lower than the current top-end model. Because system board and memory hardware may differ among product lines, you probably should consult an experienced local technician to evaluate whether it’s worth upgrading your system, determining the most appropriate replacement CPU, and have that technician do the upgrade.

Upgrading system boards is even more difficult. You’ll need to make many different sorts of connections and set numerous options during system board installation. Unless you already have significant experience installing new system boards, this is definitely a job for an experienced technician.

My current preference for cost-effective CPUs is the 2.8 Ghz AMD quad-core Phenom II line. Although most operating systems do not efficiently use all four CPUs on any processing chip, this new processor line does have significant overall performance improvements compared to earlier models. You’ll most likely need to upgrade the system board and memory. The Phenom II requires DDR2 1066 memory and a system board with an AM2+ socket. I like the Gigabyte boards built around the AMD 790 series chipsets.

Power supplies. The fast new hardware that we’ve discussed over the past several weeks does require a lot of power and cooling, and you may need to upgrade your power supply. At this time, I am using 600-watt power supplies to ensure that there’s ample power, especially if you have installed more than one hard disk. The brand is not important but be sure it has enough of the right kinds of power plugs — at least two, preferably four, SATA hard disk power plugs, at least one six-pin PCI-E video card plug, plus the usual 20-pin and four-pin system board main power plugs. You’ll want a floppy disk power connector and some spare, traditional four-pin Molex power plugs for your CD/DVD, fans and front panel power lights. The power supply should have one or two large, quiet fans. I prefer 120-millimeter fans to move a lot of air quietly.

Replacing the power supply is not difficult if you take care to avoid disturbing other cables, connections and settings inside your computer. Open up both side panels of the computer case. Disconnect the main AC power card from the wall outlet. Then disconnect all internal connections to system boards, disk drives of all sorts, fans and video cards. Remove the four rear screws that attach the power supply to the case, carefully sliding it out to avoid hitting and damaging other components. Slide in the new power supply, attach the screws and reconnect the various power plugs.

Ideally, rather than leaving a tangled mess of power wires inside the computer case where they can get caught in fans or tug on other connections, take some heavy wire ties, loop the extra connectors and overly long cables into one or more neat bundles and wire tie them together.

Video card upgrades. Upgrading to a really fast video card is worthwhile only if you are a serious gamer, a designer using AutoCAD or using the latest version of Adobe PhotoShop CS4 and other higher-end Abode products. Most business users will not see any obvious benefit.

Having said that, upgrading a video card can be easy if your intended upgrade card contains the same brand video chipsets as the video card you’re replacing. Although there are many video card brands, almost all include basic video chipsets made by either ATI or nVidia.

Both of these vendors use what’s often termed “unified drivers,” which means the recent ATI or nVidia device driver software will work with nearly all brands of recent video cards using a wide range of low-end to high-end ATI or nVidia chipsets. That’s a positive development because mismatched video driver software will usually result in a complete system crash at boot-up.

For this reason, a home upgrader is well-advised to purchase an upgrade card that incorporates the basic video chips from the same vendor as their existing display hardware and to first ensure they have already installed the latest stable device driver software from either ATI or nVidia, as appropriate. Under the best circumstances, physically swapping the video cards will be all that’s required.

To determine whether your computer currently uses either ATI or nVidia video chipsets, check the printed materials that came with your computer. If that is not clear, go to “Start,” “Settings,” “Control Panel,” “System,” “Hardware” tab, “Device Manager” button, “Display Adapters” and then click on the “Display Adapters” + box. Windows will list the video chipset manufacturer and series. Double click on the chipset listing and you will bring up the “Properties” box. Click on the “Driver” table and Windows will list complete information about which video card device driver software is currently installed. If it’s within a year or so, there should be no problem.

You can manually check for a standard update by clicking on “Start,” “Windows Update” and select the “custom” button. After Windows Update checks your computer for currently installed software, click on the “Hardware, optional” button to see whether newer video software is available and certified by Microsoft. If so, choose and install it.

If you decide to upgrade with a video card using a different vendor’s chipsets, then you simply need to temporarily set your display to VGA 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 before starting your upgrade. To do this, right click on a blank area of your Windows desktop, choose “Properties,” then the “Settings” tab and adjust the “screen resolution” slider to these lower resolutions.

Because I use several high-end Adobe products in my legal practice, I looked carefully for an advanced video chipset that supported all of the various Adobe Master Suite CS4 products, not just PhotoShop. Weirdly, some of the Adobe products packaged together as Abode Master Collection CS4 are certified with some video chipsets and other Adobe products are certified with an entirely different group of video chipsets.

The only economical video chipset that I found to be broadly compatible was the ATI Radeon 3870 set of products. Because I have been using lower-end Radeon video cards for some time, installing a 3870-based video card was easy, at least for Windows XP systems. I found the single ATI 3870 GPU cards made by Sapphire were fast, well made and affordable, costing between $85 and $100.

Summary Upgrade Specifications. Here’s a modern computer system that I would consider a very good balance of performance and cost-effectiveness:
1. Mid-tower case with 600-watt power supply, brand unimportant.
2. AMD Phenom II 2.8 gigahertz CPU processor.
3. Gigabyte Socket AM2+ system board, model depending upon your particular peripheral device needs. I prefer the newer AMD 790 series of chipsets.
4. Four gigabytes DDR2 1066 DRAM memory.
5. Video card based upon ATI single-processor 3870 GPU chipset. Sapphire brand has been reliable and inexpensive.
6. Sony or comparable 16x DVD and CD burner.
7. Standard 3.5-inch, 1.44 MB floppy disk for operating system installation.
8. Western Digital Black Caviar 640GB WD6401AALS hard disk. If you are interested in maximum performance, then use a 10,000-rpm Western Digital. 300GB VeliceRaptor hard disk as your C: boot drive and program storage drive and the 640 GB WD6401AALS drive as your D: drive where your data would be stored.
9. Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. Surprisingly, the less expensive models seem more reliable.
10. Digital monitor to taste. At the moment, the 23- and 24-inch 1080p flat screen monitors from Acer, ASUS, HP and Samsung seem like the best deals.

Video Card Setup: WARNING: If any technical setup information below seems at all confusing to you, then I would urge you to stop at this time and either abandon any video upgrade or get the job done by a competent local technician.

A few days before you update your video device driver software, and again when you later upgrade your video hardware go to Windows “Start,” “Settings,” “Control Panel,” “System,” “System Restore” and be absolutely sure that “System Restore” has been operating and tracking all drives. Use your system regularly for a few days to ensure that you have at least one good system restore point..

When you are ready to install the new video card, shut down your computer, ground yourself to avoid static discharge, and unplug the power cord. Open the side panel that allows access to the system board. Find the first PCI-E card slot. If your computer is too old to include a PCI-E slot, then it is too old to be worth upgrading even if you could still find the older hardware.

The physical side of the upgrade process can be straightforward unless other computer components physically get in the way. Many modern computers, particularly less expensive systems, often include a lower-end video display on the system board rather than as a separate video card. In that case, you will not have a separate display card to first remove but instead you’ll just plug the new video card directly into the first PCI-E slot, secure it to the case with the appropriate screw, and, if required, plug in a 6-pin auxiliary power cable.

However, when you next reboot, you will first need to go into the BIOS setup and configure your hardware to set the new video card as the default boot-up display. If you don’t have a free 6-pin power plug, then you will need to get a simple adapter from older 4-pin Molex power plugs to a 6-pin PCI-E video card power plug.

Again, don’t try this at home if you are at all uncertain about what to do. Instead, have a local technician do the work for you. Making a mistake in the BIOS setup can make your system unusable until a technician restores the BIOS to factory defaults.

Physically installing a powerful new video card can be sublimely easy or really tricky, depending upon whether your system has a modern power supply with a free 6-pin power plug for the PCI-E video card and depending upon whether your existing computer has system board components, hard disks, cables or other hardware that physically get in the way.

Even if your system does not have a free six-pin PCI-E power connector, a computer technician often can provide a simple adapter that converts traditional four pin Molex power connectors to 6-pin PCI-E, so this is not a serious problem. Likewise, if you have cables or hard disks that physically interfere, these can be moved if you know what you’re doing. However, both of these factors should be taken into account before you decide whether to install a faster video card. Upgrading simply may not be worth the trouble.

I upgraded three Windows XP and Windows XP x64 computers with these Sapphire video cards and found that the upgrades to Windows XP systems were easy and worthwhile. Upgrading the Windows XP x64 system was troublesome because ATI’s newest 2009 x64 drivers were not stable, forcing me rebuild the system and revert to ATI’s older but stable July 2008 x64 software. I would expect the same stability problems with the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, which is based upon the XP x64 software.

If you experience any crashing after upgrading device driver hardware, then boot up in Windows Safe Mode by passing the F8 key several times during your next boot-up. Windows Safe Mode will start and then ask you whether you wish to boot normally. Answer No and then choose a system restore point that you know will work reliably. Your system will revert to the earlier software and settings, thus giving you a stable system and another chance to cause yourself grief.

After you have physically installed any new video card, then run the installation disk that comes with your new hardware and again go to “properties”, “settings” to configure your new display to your taste.

Local attorney Joe Kashi received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT and his law degree from Georgetown University. He has published many articles about computer technology, law practice and digital photography in national media since 1990. Many of his technology and photography articles can be accessed through his Web site, www.kashilaw.com.

Big shots — Eruption photographers find their work appearing far and wide

2009-03-31T22:10:00.002-08:00

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Just like any good news photographer, David Wartinbee didn’t waste time celebrating the good luck that put him in the right place at the right time with a camera in his hand as a spectacular mushroom cloud bloomed over Mount Redoubt on Saturday afternoon. He lifted his camera to his eye and started shooting, and didn’t stop until the eruption subsided.

Then he went straight to his computer and filed his images. Later that evening they started showing up in media venues across the state, and soon, the nation and world.

All in a day’s work for an intrepid roving news photographer.

Except Wartinbee isn’t a news photographer. He doesn’t work for a media company or wire service; doesn’t have a press pass or journalism credentials. He’s a biology professor at Kenai Peninsula College’s Kenai River Campus with a recreational interest in photography whose front porch in Soldotna faces out across Cook Inlet, and who happened to be pulling into his driveway just when the mountain started to go off.

But through the power of digital cameras and the Internet, and a world that’s becoming insatiable for instantaneous imagery, Wartinbee and other central peninsula residents were deputized as newshounds that day, by virtue of having cameras, having something spectacular to point them at, and being willing to share.

Shots seen ’round the world

Until Saturday, Mount Redoubt hasn’t been terribly cooperative with photographers in this round of activity. Other than some visible steam plumes, most of the volcano’s many eruptions since March 22 happened at night or were shrouded behind clouds and haze. Redoubt hadn’t produced anything nearly as visually exciting as the iconic image that came from its last eruptive cycle in 1989-1990, when a massive, red-tinged mushroom cloud spread over the mountain April 21, 1990.

Saturday was different. Clouds lifted, the air was clear and the mountain was visible from the Kenai Peninsula around 2:30 p.m.

“Kathy (Wartinbee’s wife) and I came home from whatever we were doing — I think we did something exciting like go to the dump. When we came back and were driving down the road to our driveway, I could see that the mountain was visible, and we hadn’t seen it for days,” Wartinbee said.

He got out his camera to take a few shots, and showed Kathy the spot where he’d taken a photo of Redoubt venting at sunset on March 15.

“I started taking pictures from the deck and as I did I could see something was going on. I said, ‘Hey, there’s a bubble there, and it’s growing.’ And it was growing very fast and we just sat there and watched this thing blossom. We were absolutely dumbfounded by how fast it happened, how fast it went from a little bubble to bang, this thing is there. It wasn’t 15 minutes from the time it started to the time there was this huge, anvil-shaped cloud that was moving toward us,” he said.

Wartinbee’s first shots were dark as the ash cloud was low on the horizon. As it gained altitude it caught the sunlight. By the end of the event Wartinbee had to zoom out to get the spreading ash cloud in the frame.

He went to his computer and downloaded the images, then sent some to the Alaska Volcano Observatory, which posts volcano images on its Web site, www.avo.alaska.edu. The photos are free to download and use, and media sources can print or air them, but must include the photographer’s name. Wartinbee also sent a few to news sources in the state, thinking they might want some eruption shots.

KTUU TV aired one of his photos in its late newscast Saturday, and the Anchorage Daily News ran the same shot in its Sunday edition. From there it was picked up by The Associated Press, a content-sharing membership organization for media outlets worldwide. And that’s where it went — worldwide.

Wartinbee did an Internet search for the photo Sunday, and found it on Web sites for National Public Radio and several newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and papers in a Syracuse, N.Y., Buffalo, N.Y., Taiwan, South America and Finland. It’s also on the U.S. Army Alaska’s Web site and numerous blog sites — all with his name attached to it.

“I just thought, ‘I wonder how far this thing has gone? If they (the Daily News and KTUU) picked it up, I wonder if anybody else did?’ And it’s amazing how far it’s gone. It’s like, ‘Wow, how many people are interested in this little news item?’” Wartinbee said. “My 15 minutes of fame.”

Jaden Larson, of Nikiski, is enjoying her 15 minutes of fame, as well — one for every year she’s been alive.

The Nikiski Middle School eighth-grader was driving home from a movie in Kenai on Saturday with her sister when they noticed an oddly dark cloud creeping overhead as they were passing The Salvation Army thrift store on the Kenai Spur Highway.

“We just kind of thought it was an odd-looking cloud so I got some pictures because I didn’t know what it was,” she said.

Jaden and her sister continued driving north, but stopped around South Miller Loop to take more photos as the dark ash cloud spread overhead. When they got home, Jaden’s mother called the Alaska Volcano Observatory about the ash fall, and the woman they spoke to encouraged them to e-mail photos that AVO could post on its Web site. Jaden sent about 26 pictures, and eight or nine were posted on the Web site, she said. The photos spread from there.

“We saw one actually on National Geographic, their Web site. It was also on the Anchorage Daily News. We’ve been looking around. It’s pretty cool,” Jaden said. “It’s exciting. My mom was calling all our family to go look. Everyone at school was like, ‘Did you see your pictures online?’”

Jaden said she enjoys photography, and is starting to turn it into a moneymaking endeavor doing portraiture, especially maternity and newborns. She posts her work on her site, www.smilineyesphotography.weebly.com.

“I’ve always liked to take pictures and my parents bought me an expensive camera so I’ve been doing more of it,” she said.

Jaden said she likes portraiture, and hadn’t considered going into news photography in the future, which is still a long way off, considering she’s in middle school. But if she ever does, she’s already got a widely circulated breaking news shot to her name.

For Wartinbee, Saturday fulfilled a dream he’s long had — to see a volcanic eruption in person.

“I’ve seen pictures from years ago, and a friend from up here in Alaska sent me ash in ’89, and I’ve always wanted to see one,” he said.

Now he’s not only got the memories and photos to prompt them, he’s also got some notoriety to go with the experience.

“One of the blogs (that posted his photo) said, ‘Beautiful picture by David Wartinbee.’ Well, that’s cool. Thank you very much.”

Got it covered — Musicians chip in to help Veronica’s pay to play

2009-03-31T22:09:00.001-08:00

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

When Diane Hooper and Kathy Miller bought Veronica’s in Kenai in November, they vowed to revive the quirky coffee shop’s tradition of live music performances in part as a service to customers, and as a way to support and promote local musicians.

Little did they know they’d be contributing to the likes of Paul McCartney, as well.

A new song

Music and Veronica’s go together like the sweet, golden cornbread that ubiquitously accompanies soup and sandwich orders. No matter the shape, size, consistency or flavor, the place wouldn’t be the same without it.

The coffee shop itself is musical, with the squeaks, creaks, sighs and whispers of a 90-year-old, added-on-to wooden building weathering the perpetual wind atop the Kenai River mouth bluff in Old Town Kenai. Add to that the percussion of a bustling kitchen, squealing espresso machine and furniture wobbling for balance against the worn-in floor and it’s a symphony in need of a melody.

That’s one of the reasons Hooper and Miller were drawn to buy it.

“It’s a magical place at night with the snow falling and the lights on and the music. And now I can be part of it every day,” Hooper said.

Previous owners Rebecca Lambourn and Stan Coleman had cut back on live music because of declining revenue. Music nights weren’t big moneymakers but Lambourn hired musicians anyway, if for no other reason than her own enjoyment and dedication to the local arts community. But as fewer and fewer customers came out to listen last fall, she was less and less inclined to continue the practice.

When Hooper and Miller took over, they kept open mic nights going, on Fridays, and reinstituted live music Saturdays. But with all the costs involved in taking over a business, Hooper said she and Miller didn’t have money to spare. They needed the music nights to pay for themselves in order to continue.

That prospect became more daunting with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers on the scene, sending letters and making phone calls insisting Veronica’s pay for a blanket performance license if they were to host live music nights, or even play CDs over the speakers.

To the tune of $300

ASCAP is a membership association of more than 320,000 U.S. composers, songwriters, lyricists and music publishers of all genres that collects and distributes royalties from the use of members’ copyrighted songs.

Think of it as the intellectual property police for music. Every time a copyrighted song is played for public consumption, whether it’s live, used in a commercial, or piped over the speakers at a hockey game, airplane or restaurant, whoever composed the song and wrote the lyrics is supposed to be compensated for it.

That’s where ASCAP and similar organizations, including Broadcast Music Inc., come in. In the case of radio or TV, where music is extensively tracked and logged, ASCAP collects a fee each time a song is played. Establishments like restaurants or bars that play recorded music or host live performances where copyrighted songs are played can pay for a blanket license every year that covers any of their songs that are covered.

“You have basically five exclusive rights that are yours, that’s how you raise money from intellectual property. One of those rights is the right for public performance. If someone wants to perform your song in public, they need your permission. They need to pay you something,” said Vincent Candilora, senior vice president of licensing with ASCAP, based in Nashville.

Candilora points out that ASCAP isn’t part of the big recording labels, and the money the organization collects doesn’t go to Britney Spears. It’s for the people who write the music, who aren’t always the ones making it big performing the songs, or the record companies that rake in cash from selling them.

“Most people think that if you write a hit song you’re on easy street, but that is not the case. You need to separate out the difference between recording artists and songwriters,” he said.

Take the hit country song, “The Gambler,” for instance. Who comes to mind?

“Kenny Rogers. But Kenny Rogers didn’t write that song. It was written by a guy named Don Schlitz,” Candilora said. “When Kenny Rogers’ bank account goes down, he can go on tour and sell tickets to concerts and T-shirts. A couple years ago he was selling roasted chicken. Don Schlitz can’t do that. I haven’t met anybody who wants to buy a Don Schlitz T-shirt. That’s the difference between a songwriter and an artist.”

An ASCAP license is a routine business expense, Candilora said, like a restaurant buying parsley that’s only used to spruce up a plate.

“You have to get permission to use someone else’s property. It’s not theirs, so there’s that fairness aspect to it,” he said. “The other aspect I like to think of is how do you put a value on music? … I think it makes a major contribution to our culture, and people who have been gifted with the ability to write this music should be able make a living from it. That shouldn’t be overlooked, either. It isn’t just parsley.”

ASCAP does put a value on music. A blanket license is a calculated based on how music’s used and how many people an establishment holds. If a restaurant just plays CDs, a license would cost 3.11 times the number of people allowed in a building based on its posted fire code occupancy, Candilora said. If it hosts live music three or less days a week, it’s 4.46 times occupancy. If it hosts music four to seven days a week, it’s 5.34 times occupancy. If there’s a cover charge, the rate goes up again.

Veronica’s was facing a bill of a little over $300, and ASCAP was not letting them forget it. Candilora said ASCAP has 40 teams of license managers around the country. Some drive around looking for places that use music. Once they find an establishment, get its occupancy and determine how they use music, they record the information and the establishment starts receiving letters explaining what ASCAP is, what copyright law dictates and what they owe for a license. If they don’t pay, ASCAP follows up with phone calls.

If they still don’t pay, ASCAP might send a regional license manager in to speak to the business owner, and from there might pursue a legal remedy.

“As a last resort what we have to do, ultimately, is we will file suit for copyright infringement if it continues. It’s not something we like to do and, as I said, it’s a last resort, but we are always in the process of filing suits. There’s always a small percentage who think that, ‘We’re just a small place and you have bigger fish to fry. You won’t sue us.’ Once you’re on our radar screen, it really won’t go away,” Candilora said.

The nearest ASCAP regional team is based Seattle, Candilora said, but license managers do make trips up to Alaska, which is probably how Veronica’s ended up on the radar screen.

“Whoever draws the longest straw, or shortest straw, gets to do a little stint in Alaska. I’ll be honest with you, they’re not there 52 weeks of the year. Maybe three months of the year. ... Some places may not see a license rep but maybe once a year or once every two years,” he said.

The beat goes on

Veronica’s was faced with the same set of choices as every business that ends up on the ASCAP mailing list — pay up; ignore the letters and calls and hope they don’t get sued; switch to a format of all-original music, which precludes a lot of background music and makes live sets extremely difficult; or stop the music altogether.

For Veronica’s, it came down to paying or not playing. Not playing wasn’t the preferred option.

“No one else is really doing music in this town. It’s the only place that does music anymore that isn’t smoky and an alcoholy bar. I couldn’t let it die,” said Katie Evans, a musician who works at Veronica’s.

With the blessing of Hooper and Miller, Evans organized a fundraiser March 20 to pay for the license. She invited local musicians to play three-song sets, and local artists and community members to donate items for a Chinese auction. There wasn’t a cover charge, but a jug was set out for donations, and all the tips from the night went into the donations pile, as well.

Evans said she wasn’t sure how the event would go, since she’d heard grumbling over having to pay for the license in the first place.

Scot Q. Merry, a local musician and music producer who moved up from Nashville, said he understands why people may be resistant to paying for a license, but it’s beneficial in the long run.

“I don’t like to see them struggle to pay more bills than they should, but by the same token, intellectual property is something that is just getting so abused, and it trickles down to us,” Merry said, listing illegal music downloads as an example. “… I certainly understand those people who think it’s too small, it’s too something. It shouldn’t be required. It’s that same attitude, ‘Oh, music should be free.’ While I appreciate that hippy approach, the quality improves when a community supports the artists. It’s always good for the community, good for the people, good for the artists — it’s an important part of our culture. It’s the United States. Everything costs.”

The hardest-to-swallow chunk of the ASCAP blanket license is the fact that the money goes to popular songwriters, not necessarily the ones whose songs are played, Merry said. Since individual songs aren’t tracked with a blanket license, ASCAP notes the genre of music played at an establishment, and divvies most the license fees up among the most popular songwriters in that genre, under the assumption that the popular music is played most often.

At Veronica’s, music tends toward folk or acoustic classic rock.

“I’ll guarantee the Beatles will get some of the money Veronica’s will pay,” Merry said. “They break it down among the most popular songwriters in whatever genra you’re talking about. We’re probably gonna help pay for the light bill on Paul McCartney’s castle this week.”

Still, Merry said it’s a worthy bill to pay.

“With Veronica’s being a place that supports songwriters, even though the songwriters they support may not see any of that money, it’s the right thing to do. For one, it shows they really are supporting the songwriters in some way,” he said.

And vice versa at Veronica’s. Singers, songwriters and musicians filled the coffee shop to standing room only March 20.

“Everything went phenomenally,” Hooper said. “We were able to raise money to pay for almost three years’ licenses. There was tremendous support and outpouring from the local community. It was packed. It was just wonderful.

“We definitely are going to keep Friday and Saturday nights going. It’s been absolutely great,” she said. “The music will continue.”

Pursed strings — Prospective recipients of stimulus say short-term funds do good in long term

2009-03-31T22:08:00.000-08:00

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Immediately after Gov. Sarah Palin announced March 18 that she wouldn’t request nearly a third of the federal stimulus money slated for Alaska — about $288 million of $931 million — because there were strings attached, agencies and organizations that stood to receive funding started pulling strings of their own.

Palin later said the money was still on the table, and that she wanted the Legislature to review proposed stimulus spending to avoid leaving the state with extra costs from programs or jobs created with the two-year money. Lobbying began nearly as soon as Palin’s announcement was made to convince legislators that the money would be put to good use without creating bills that would come due when the federal dollars ran out.

On the Kenai Peninsula, the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District and Kenai Peninsula Food Bank say a short-term infusion of funding can be spent in a way that provides long-term benefits without recurring costs.

“We’re mostly interested in putting roots into the ground to help us be a stronger district, and not add things,” said Assistant Superintendent Steve Atwater, who will become superintendent at the end of June.

The district has a list of proposed uses for the $5 million it stands to receive in stimulus money. Only one proposal would create a new position — a stimulus funds coordinator who would track implementation of the funding and document compliance with federal regulations on the how the money is spent. But even that job would be advertised and hired as a two-year position that would end when the money does, said Melody Douglas, chief financial officer for the district.

The rest of it would be used for training, upgrading technology and in other ways meant to increase student achievement (see sidebar for list of proposed programs). Essentially, the district would be paying to make teachers better, not paying for new teachers.

“These are things we always talk about and want to do, especially educational assistive technology for preschoolers,” Atwater said.

“It’s not really a Christmas list, it was on our priority list anyway,” he said.
“We’ve been talking about this for a long time, what we really hope is for the infusion to be able to accelerate the plans,” Douglas said.

In the realm of professional development, for example, a one-time infusion of cash can provide lasting dividends because the district can use it to train its own people, who can then train colleagues in the future.

“We can grow our capacity so the trainers have the recourses within the district, so we don’t have to spend ten grand to get trainers in here,” Atwater said.

Douglas said that, in talking to legislators, the concern seems to be that money could be spent frivolously, without much consideration or comprehensive planning. The district supplied the peninsula’s legislative delegation with a specific list of what the money could go toward.

“They were extremely pleased with having received it,” Douglas said. “It was like, ‘OK, this is what we were waiting for.’”

The majority of the education portion of the stimulus money would be funneled through the federal entitlement programs that serve special-needs and low-income students, and there are already a host of rules and guidelines for how that money is used.

“The Department of Education requires us to submit plans to the feds for how we’re going to spend the money,” Atwater said. “… This is not just free cash we can play with as we see fit. We can’t just go buy hot tubs. We have limits on where the money can go.

“This will help our special-needs kids. Anything we can do to help these kids is great,” he said.

Part of the governor’s stated rationale for not requesting all the federal funding is it could balloon budgets and create an expectation that newly created services or programs would continue after the money is gone.

Douglas said that wouldn’t happen at KPBSD, in part because the stimulus money would be a special revenue fund and have nothing to do with the district’s general fund budget. It won’t save the district any money by footing any existing bills, and it won’t create growth within the existing budget.

“These funds can’t be used to supplant general fund money. It cannot be used for anything we already pay for in the general fund,” she said.

But that’s not to say new practices that could come out of the stimulus money would necessarily cease to exist. The district’s budget philosophy every year is to look at where the district is at and where it wants to be, and prioritize spending to do the most good in advancing the district toward its goals, Douglas said.
Projects receiving stimulus funding would be looked at in that same vein, and if they prove to be vital in impacting student achievement, the district may find a way to continue funding them within its own budget.

“There could be some things we could do differently or better with this infusion. Using the budget model we could be in a much better place after this,” Douglas said.

At the food bank, Director Linda Swarner said money would be used to boost the existing emergency food program.

“We would not institute new programs, we would use it for existing programs, just to enhance what we have,” she said. “All of the funds that we get here at the Kenai Peninsula Food Bank stays on the peninsula and we help hungry residents from Homer to Moose Pass,” she said.

Money would be used to buy food for the food bank’s member agencies across the peninsula, including senior centers and other meal programs. It could also go to supplement the food boxes given out to residents at the food bank itself.

“It we got a significant amount it would go toward the clients that come in on a monthly basis. First and foremost would go to the 64 member agencies that have feeding programs. They’re all seeing an influx, and we’re seeing an influx in individuals and households coming to inquire about services,” Swarner said.
If the funding amounted to a large sum, it could be used to accomplish projects with one-time costs that the food bank couldn’t otherwise afford, like expanding or upgrading the food warehouse.

Otherwise, stimulus money will be used to do what the food bank always does — feed people.

“I strongly support the Legislature to consider accepting the stimulus money for the food programs,” Swarner said.

Atwater has a similar message for education funding. He and Douglas say the message appears to be well-received.

“It had a life of its own. It was such a shocking thing that the governor would say no to money for education,” Atwater said. “It didn’t take a whole lot of effort to get people upset. We didn’t have to lobby really hard.”

On Friday, the House approved a resolution accepting any money that Gov. Palin does not request from the state’s estimated $930 million share of the federal stimulus package. As of Monday, a similar measure was waiting to be voted on in the Senate, and the House Finance Committee had begun debate on a spending bill that would direct parts of the funding to specific agencies.

Environmental concern over Drift River spill potential grows

2009-03-31T22:06:00.001-08:00

By Naomi Klouda
Homer Tribune

A tank farm at the base of Mount Redoubt containing 6.2 million gallons of crude continued to raise concerns this week, while officials formed a unified command to react if volcanoic ash and melting glacial ice sent floods down the Drift River plain.

Fearing risk of an oil spill in Cook Inlet during this period of eruptions, Cook Inletkeeper Director Bob Shavelson went to the Coast Guard’s boss at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Shavelson’s letter to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano urged her to order Cook Inlet Pipeline Co., to remove the 6.2 million gallons of oil at the Drift River Terminal at the base of the erupting Mt. Redoubt volcano until conditions improve.

“We are writing to ask you to take swift action to protect Alaska fisheries and the countless people they support from the threat of a major oil spill in Cook Inlet, Alaska,” Shavelson wrote. He described the precarious situation of the terminal’s location at the base of Mount Redoubt with the volcano erupting, sending mud, water and debris flowing down the Drift River.

“This scenario did not unfold overnight. Similar events transpired during the 1989-90 eruption of Mt. Redoubt. In the current instance, the Mt. Redoubt volcano has been in a heightened state of seismic activity since late fall of 2008. Since that time the DFT operator — Cook Inlet Pipeline Company… has refused to release to the public information on the facility’s Volcano Readiness Plan and the volume of oil remaining in the facility’s tank farm, citing Homer Security Act exclusions,” he wrote.

The Coast Guard backed the company’s decision to not reveal how much crude was stored in the Drift River tanks, even though it’s now established policy for tankers in Prince William Sound to release their tank volume information.

The situation boils down to two questions, Shavelson said. “Why was Chevron hiding behind façade of the Homeland Security Act? (And) why don’t our laws and rules accommodate a worse-case scenario in places where we know the risk is high?”

The Coast Guard has regulatory power over Cook Inlet Pipeline Co., said spokesperson Sara Frances. “We have the authority, if there is a significant threat to the environment, the Coast Guard can direct them to remove oil or suspend operations,” she said.

The Coast Guard did not ask the company to suspend operations or move the fuel. Instead, in a press conference Monday, Coast Guard officials joined with terminal owners and the Department of Environmental Conservation to form a combined command to pool spill resources and expertise.

“This is an ongoing operation, and granted it exists at the base of a volcano, but they have the containment in place, they have contingency plans, so at this time we don’t feel it’s necessary to make them remove the oil,” Francis had said last week. “In any case, it’s not safe to allow a vessel in to do the removal, or we don’t know if it’s safe because debris and mud slides have occurred, and the tanker could be damaged.”

This could also risk a spill, she said.

After Thursday and Friday blasts from Redoubt, the company released a statement saying the engineer who designed the dike had performed an aerial inspection of it.

“And (he) is confident the dike remains sound. He and a CIPL engineer are scheduled to fly out to Drift River Terminal to continue assessments as soon as ash clears and weather permits,” the statement read.

CIPL is developing plans to remove debris and clear the road to the safe haven and the heliport as the first step of action. Clean up of the outbuildings will follow.

“The initial goal is to prepare the facility to load a tanker as soon as is safely possible,” it read. By Monday, the company was holding firm on this decision, with DEC and Coast Guard collaboration.

The Coast Guard plans to perform tests at the loading platform and will advise CIPL of the results. These tests determine the level of debris and depth of the water and will decide when it is safe to allow a tanker to enter the area.

Not only is the terminal of concern, but also a 42-mile pipeline on the west side of Cook Inlet that carries the crude from oil drills to the terminal, Shavelson said.

“Certainly we are aware of the threat to the environment, but there’s also the issue of commerce and jobs, as well as products to Alaska residents that come from oil,” Francis said.

The terminal is made up of seven tanks, with a maximum capacity of 277,000 barrels, Francis said. The facility includes buildings for workers and a platform leading two miles from the terminal to the dock where crude is loaded onto tankers.

The facility was built in 1967-68 on land Chevron purchased from the Kenai Peninsula Borough. Environmental protections and processes were not yet developed to regulate the facility during the time of its construction. According to the EPA, it operates on two clean water discharge permits that require renewal every five years.

After Redoubt blew in 1989-90, the company installed a dike for flood protection. Francis said the engineering work on the dike won a design award.

So far, the dike has held, but buildings at the terminal experienced flooding after the Thursday morning blast unleashed lahars, landslides of wet volcanic debris running down the side of a volcano. Shavelson, who said he has been to the facility, said he is not reassured by the positioning of dikes. The power of nature has proven stronger than man-made innovations.

“And you can’t lose sight of the fact that the public was denied information before the situation got into crisis mode,” he said.

When viewing the terminal, Shavelson said it is surrounded by a broad flood plain.

“I also see the force of nature and I think we can look at Katrina and any number of instances where it is no match for nature’s force. A lahar can dig a new channel, moving directly at this terminal. The situation can change rapidly. We’ve been extremely lucky.”

Cook Inlet does not have the capacity to deal with a spill potentially 6 million gallons strong, he said.

Resurrecting history — Church in need of long-awaited repairs

2009-03-31T22:01:00.007-08:00

By Clark Fair
Redoubt Reporter

When parishioner Dorothy Gray stands in the nave of Kenai’s Russian Orthodox Church and narrates for a group of tourists the story of the church, she usually keeps to a set chronology that begins with visiting missionaries in the late 1700s and progresses to the resident priest of the present day.

Gray highlights her narrative with tales of the sometimes “despicable” Russian fur traders, with the spiritual and practical benefits brought to the area by the priests, and with the costs of construction and many of the sacred icons inside the church. When she finishes with her story and answers questions, she hopes tourists will be inspired to drop off donations as they head out the door.

Although the church sits in Old Town Kenai and is one of the city’s primary tourist attractions, it still functions as an active place of worship, and the money is crucial to keeping it going and in good shape. Donations alone, however, are not going to be enough for the work that is now necessary to keep the church intact.

The building has serious structural problems that will require $255,000 to repair, a figure that dwarfs any of the previous price tags attached to its history: the original cost of the church, the purchase of its icons, the construction of the nearby chapel and rectory, the addition of the bell tower, and the many repairs along the way.

The history of the Holy Assumption of the Virgin Mary Orthodox Church in Kenai dates back more than a century.

In April 1894, when word arrived that their petition had been approved, the Russian Orthodox parishioners in Kenai were pleased. The Holy Ruling Synod in Russia had agreed to allow them to build the new church for which they had been hoping, replacing the deteriorating original church that the revered Father Igumen Nicholai had established in the 1840s.

And to help fund the project, the Alaskan Ecclesiastical Administration had sent along $400.

In their petition, the parishioners had detailed their expected expenses and the materials they would need to complete the project, so they wasted little time celebrating and got right to work.

Under the guidance of Father Alexander Yaroshevich, the work began on a site just south of the rectory on property that once had housed Nikolaevskii Redoubt, or Fort St. Nicholas, the first area Russian fur-trading outpost, established in 1795 by the Lebedev-Lastochin Company.

Each church family was required to donate five hand-hewn logs to the process. The plan called for 6-by-6-inch logs, bladed flat on each side (to form smooth walls and allow for easier stacking), and for dovetails where the logs met to form perpendicular adjoining walls.

Construction supervisor Alexander Demidov’s inventory of expenses included $49.50 for 16,500 shingles, $57 for several kegs of nails, $8 for two wide-headed axes and a new hand-drill, and $50 for paint. Also included in the budget was $420 for four months of labor at $3.50 a day.

The grand total was expected to be $916.31 — more than $21,000 in today’s money.

The project proceeded as planned, and, in an October 1895 letter, Father Yaroshevich announced that the church was complete. In the spring of 1896, under the guidance of a new priest, Father Ionn Bortnovsky, Kenai’s shiny new church was consecrated to God.

In 1900, at a cost of another $300, the church was expanded westward and a belfry was erected over the new addition. At the same time, a white picket fence was constructed around the perimeter of the church grounds. After those renovations, the Kenai church remained virtually unchanged —except for repairs, repainting and the installation of a concrete-block foundation — for the next century.

In 1970, however, one crucial change did occur: The church was named a National Historic Landmark, one of only two in the Kenai Peninsula Borough — the other is the Yukon Island Main Site in Kachemak Bay — and of only 48 across the entire state. The National Park Service, which oversees the maintenance and protection of national landmarks, termed it “the principal and most enduring representative of Russian culture in southcentral Alaska.”

In addition to bringing Christianity to the Kenai Peninsula, Russian Orthodox priests had also brought medical supplies, taught agriculture and new home-building skills to the Natives, acted as law enforcement when the “piratelike” fur traders got out of hand, and provided the area’s first school.

In fact, for the first 40 years after Alaska was purchased in 1867 by the United States, it was the Russian government, through the church, that provided the only education on the Kenai. The funding was halted only when the communists began their takeover and secularization of Russia.Now this important symbol of Kenai’s past requires new attention. The problem lies in the heart of the structure, in the middle (and largest) section of the church — the nave, the high-domed room in which services are held each Sunday.

Parishioners who enter the nave via the west-facing front door of the church can easily see that the north and south walls are seriously out of plumb. The top of each wall leans outward, as the weight of the overhead dome and its one-ton brass chandelier push the walls sideways under the constant influence of gravity.
There is, however, more to the story: Many of the original wall logs — enclosed now between exterior lap siding and interior Sheetrock — are deteriorating.

When builders created the bell tower addition, they cut away the original west wall; although they set load-bearing columns in place of the wall, the adjoining walls to the north and south were suddenly without the interlocking piece that gave them integrity. As the wall logs deteriorated, then, the walls themselves became seriously compromised.

An effort is under way between the NPS and a nonprofit historical-preservation group called ROSSIA (Russian Orthodox Sacred Sites in Alaska) to see that the church gets what it needs — and the funding to pay for it.

Just a few months ago, ROSSIA was informed that it had received from the Save America’s Treasures coalition a $125,000 matching-funds grant to help with the restoration, and it was in the process of securing another $110,000 from the Rasmuson Foundation when the national economic crisis hit. The foundation has suspended the issuance of its larger grants, and now the church finds itself in need of more creative financing.

Consequently, a group of concerned experts congregated last week at the church to examine its structure and to discuss options and funding. On hand were ROSSIA treasurer Grant Crosby of the NPS; ROSSIA board member and Anchorage architect, Carroll Stockard; Doug Gasek of the State Historic Preservation Office; BBFM structural engineer, Troy Feller; ROSSIA secretary and lifelong member of the Russian Orthodox Church, Gray; and ROSSIA chair Sheri Buretta, who is also the chairman of the board of the Chugach Alaska Corporation. Later, they met up with Kenai city planner Marilyn Kebschull to further discuss funding.

After she unlocked the church and invited the group inside, Gray, whose Orthodox grandparents emigrated from Czechoslovakia, performed her church-history narration and answered questions. Then Crosby coordinated an examination of the premises, while Gasek, Stockard and Feller took measurements and offered suggestions and observations. Buretta and Kebschull proposed a wide variety of funding possibilities and listened to the suggestions for keeping the church together.

The restoration solution at the top of the list will involve temporarily closing and at least partially emptying the church during the repairs. The northern and southern interior and exterior walls will be stripped down to the wall logs, and deteriorating logs will be replaced. Two thick steel plates will then be bolted into the logs to “tie” them together and get them to work in unison against the roof thrust. Finally, a steel cable with a turnbuckle will be passed through the attic and attached to each wall, reconnecting the two walls and allowing them to better resist the outward force.

Also on the repair list is replacing the entire foundation. The concrete blocks now beneath the church have been settling at different rates and causing the church floors to slope slightly. Because the space beneath the church is narrow, much of the excavation for this portion of the project will have to be done by hand.

During the summer tourist season, the church pulls in about $6,000 in donations, but Gray said that ROSSIA must look to additional sources to raise the necessary funds. The Rasmuson money is still a possibility next year, she said, but even if it comes through eventually, it will not be enough to fully meet the requirements of matching funding.

This time, Gray knows, it will take more than a check from the church’s home office to do the job.

Art Seen: Drinking in changing landscapes

2009-03-31T21:58:00.003-08:00

Alaskans love to take pictures. We are surrounded by such awe-striking visuals we just about can’t help ourselves. And if responses to photo albums on Facebook are any indication, folks who don’t live here are especially wowed by the images, even if they are not National Geographic material or art pieces in their own right.

It’s wonderful that a place like Kaladi Brothers is available for the many who’d like to share their collections with the community, and it’s a boon for their business, as well, bringing in additional customers and ensuring art on the walls. Photography exhibits grace the walls of both the old and the new stores this month, and although it is mostly traditional fare, there are a few pieces that strike my fancy as being on the more unusual side.

Genevieve Klebba has been shooting photography for many years now and is thrilled to be in the digital age. She was dubious, at first, but now thoroughly enjoys the quick results and ability to edit and print the images herself. The exhibit in the Kobuk shop is titled, “This Season That We Call Winter,” and her most interesting piece is one of the wintriest.

It takes a moment to realize what one is looking at while viewing “Sunset on Ice,” which is one of the appealing facets for me. The darkened craggy ice and snow in the foreground contrasts sharply with the warm sunset behind Mount Redoubt in the background, and it feels like an image that might be captured on another planet somehow. There are apparently others who agree that it is a special image. It won the landscape category in the statewide “Alaska Wild” photography exhibition in 2007.

It is also nice to see the hanging system in effect in the separate room. Works display well in the space.

Jeremy Reeve was born and raised here and has his work in the Sterling Highway shop. He’s placed inspirational quotes below each of his pieces and has numbered, rather than titled, them. Sometimes I feel the quote has a connection with the image, and other times it’s a stretch. Reading the quotes caused me to linger longer at each image, but I fear it may have prevented me from spending more time actually engaged with the photography.

The couple that go beyond standard fare are No. 7, “Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does change the future;” and No. 16, “Love and Time: The only two things in all of life and the entire world that cannot be bought, but spent.”

“Forgiveness” presents a butterfly, contrasting with crumbling blacktop and fading paint. The areas of color/texture become almost abstract design elements, and I am able to imagine the art as being about forgiveness, both in its painfulness and its beauty.

“Love and Time” is possibly of the bottom of a glass or bottle, and the liquid might be frozen or it might not. And I might or might not agree with the quotation, actually. I can think of many things to insert into a sentence like that. But it could be argued that any I might choose could, in an archetypal way, come under the umbrella of one or the other supernouns. Love and time might actually be considered as being bought, depending on the context of a situation, as well.

It’s probably a moot point, and I’m not sure Jeremy is asking us to ponder very heavily much of this, but rather sigh pleasantly, as we enjoy the beauty of this great state. He would someday like to be a freelance photographer and fund his travels through the sale of his work. A noble cause, and I wish him well.

Zirrus VanDevere is a local mixed-media artist and owns Art Works gallery in Soldotna. She has bachelor’s degrees in fine arts and education.

Arts and Entertainment week of April 1

2009-03-31T21:55:00.002-08:00

Events:

Ongoing

Artists Without Borders in the 4D Building in Soldotna has “Unhinged,” works done on a door or window, in conjunction with a group show by local artists, through April.
Art Works in Soldotna has egg tempera paintings by Andy Hehnlin on display.
The Funky Monkey in Kenai has photography by Tony Lewis on display through April.
Kaladi Brothers on Kobuk Street in Soldotna has “This Season That We Call Winter,” a photography exhibition by Genevieve Klebba, on display.
Kaladi Brothers on the Sterling Highway in Soldotna has artwork by Melody Lee Gleichman on display through April.
The Kenai Fine Arts Center in Old Town Kenai has the a Kenai Peninsula School District visual arts celebration with work by ninth- through 12th-graders on display through April.
The Soldotna Senior Center is looking for artists to display their work in the center's lobby. Shows are one month long. Artwork must hang on the walls. Call Mary Lane at 262-8839.

First Thursday

First Thursday events today include an artist reception for Melody Lee Gleichman from 5 to 7 p.m. at Kaladi Brothers on the Sterling Highway, artists reception at Artists Without Borders for an “Unhinged” and group show from 5 to 7 p.m. in the 4D Building in Soldotna, a reception for the Kenai Peninsula School District visual arts celebration from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Kenai Fine Arts Center in Kenai, and a bluegrass jam from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. at Christ Lutheran Church in Soldotna.
The Kenai Writers Group will meet at 6:30 p.m. in the conference room at Kenai Community Library. Everyone is welcome. Bring extra copies of your work to share.
The Soldotna High School drama department presents a comedy, “The Panic Broadcast of 1938, “ at 7 p.m. at SoHi. Admission is $5. In the play, the drama and dilemmas of two wide-eyed young women, Margie and June, is set against a backdrop of their small community panicking after hearing Orson Welles’ radio production of “War of the Worlds.” They meet Tom and Hank, from a circus train making a water stop in town. Margie’s dad, the sheriff, throws the boys in jail for robbery about the time pandemonium erupts from a supposed Martian invasion sighting at the train station. As the town gathers to plan their evacuation they come face to face with an “alien” and discover the Martian invasion might not be what it seems. Cast members include: Jessiah Steffy, Delana Duncan, Holly Jenkins, Nick Tesch, Dillon Ball, Jeff Melvin, Kevin Oelrich, Keegan Eshleman, Brian Folley, Autumn Ball, Britt Wilson, Cati Smith, Josh Rutten, Chris Closson, Lizzie McDermid, Chrissy Smith and Amanda Norris.

Friday

Curtain Call Consignment Boutique is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Kenai Performers’ Old Town Playhouse in Kenai. Organizers are taking consignments of new or gently used namebrand and designer clothing, handbags, shoes, jewelry and accessories. Contact Mary Krull at 398-2931.
The Soldotna High School drama department presents a comedy, “The Panic Broadcast of 1938," at 7 p.m. at SoHi. Admission is $5. See Thursday listing.
The Kenai Central High School drama club presents “The Curious Savage,” by John Patrick, at 7 p.m. at the Renee C. Henderson Auditorium at KCHS. In the play, a wealthy woman is committed to an institution by her stepchildren to keep her from spending the family fortune to make people’s foolish wishes come true. The cast includes Alex Kiel, Catherine Hoisington, Michael Slone, Norrick McGee, Garrett Eady, Maya Johnson, Jen Kohler, Dylan Lawrence, Jesse Pedginski, Ella Stephens, Lynn Ziehmer and Kaleidoscope student Jacob Nabholz. Admission is $5 at the door.
“8 Stars of Comedy Gold,” a comedic play about Alaska history, will be performed by Sidecar, an improvisational acting troupe from New York City, at 7 p.m. at Triumvirate Theatre in the Peninsula Center Mall in Soldotna. Tickets are $7 for adults, $3 for kids, available at the Triumvirate Bookstore and at the door. For more information, visit www.triumviratetheatre.org.

Saturday

Curtain Call Consignment Boutique is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Kenai Performers’ Old Town Playhouse in Kenai. See Friday listing.
The Soldotna High School drama department presents a comedy, “The Panic Broadcast of 1938, “ at 7 p.m. at SoHi. Admission is $5. See Thursday listing.
The Kenai Central High School drama club presents “The Curious Savage,” by John Patrick, at 7 p.m. at the Renee C. Henderson Auditorium at KCHS. See Friday listing.
“8 Stars of Comedy Gold” will be performed at 7 p.m. at Triumvirate Theatre in Soldotna. See Friday listing.

Sunday

The Friends of the Kenai Community Library will hold a high tea from 2 to 4 p.m. at the Merit Inn in Kenai to raise money for the library. Catering will be by Charlotte’s. Tickets are $25, available at the library and from board members.
The Kenai Central High School drama club presents “The Curious Savage,” by John Patrick, at 3 p.m. at the Renee C. Henderson Auditorium at KCHS. See Friday listing.

Coming up

“8 Stars of Comedy Gold” will be performed at 7 p.m. April 10 and 11 at Triumvirate Theatre in Soldotna. See Friday listing. There will be a dinner theater showing at 7 p.m. April 9 at the Funky Monkey coffee shop in Kenai. Tickets for dinner and the show are $25.

Nightlife:

Friday and Saturday nights at The Riverside.

Live music

Hooligan’s Saloon in Soldotna has a jam night Thursday and Tuff-e-Nuff on Friday and Saturday nights.
The Maverick in Soldotna has the Free Beer Band on Sundays.
Moosequito’s in Sterling has Lulu Small on Friday night.
The Place in Nikiski has bluegrass by Them Other Shuckers on Friday nights around 7:30 p.m.
The Rainbow Bar in Kenai has live music by The Mabrey Brothers at 10 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
Veronica’s in Kenai has open mic night Friday and Diggin’ Roots with Robb Justice and Dan Spencer, from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Saturday.

Karaoke

9 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at the Duck Inn on Kalifornsky Beach Road.
9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays at the .406 in Kenai.
9:30 p.m. Wednesdays at Hooligan’s in Soldotna.
9 p.m. Fridays at J-Bar-B outside Soldotna.
9:30 p.m. Mondays at the Maverick in Soldotna.

Events

Hooligan's in Soldotna has Texas Hold ’Em poker at 5 and 8 p.m. Tuesdays.
The Maverick in Soldotna has a pool tournament at 8 p.m. Fridays.
Moosequito’s in Sterling has Twister night Saturday, X Box boxing night on Sunday and darts Tuesday night.

Editorial: Stumbling start to the right path

2009-03-31T21:54:00.000-08:00

For someone as image-savvy as Gov. Sarah Palin, it was surprising to see her stuff her foot in her mouth as unnecessarily as she did over federal stimulus spending.

Her announcement March 18 that she would not request a third of the federal stimulus money Alaska was eligible for, about $288 million of $931 million, caused an immediate and vehement response from prospective recipients, most notably, schools and social services agencies.

The announcement created controversy where there ordinarily is none by the governor saying “no thanks” to money that would feed the poor and help educate special-needs and financially disadvantaged kids.

She might as well have kicked a puppy while she was at it.

Out of the fervor that erupted, a new plan emerged —the Legislature would consider spending plans and decide what funding to accept and what to deny. Such oversight is critical to making sure this financial windfall does not turn into an obligation in two years when the money runs out.

In her initial announcement, Gov. Palin’s rationale for turning down the money was that it had strings attached. It would require new regulations and could balloon government and the organizations receiving money by creating new jobs and programs that don’t have a source of funding other than this one-time infusion of federal cash.

Speculation about Gov. Palin’s possible national political motives aside, those are valid points and important pitfalls to guard against. It is entirely appropriate and crucial, in fact, that there be scrutiny on this funding and accountability on how it’s spent, to ensure it is used as intended to boost the economy and help those most in need, not as a one-time, free-for-all of frivolous spending.

Had Gov. Palin communicated her concerns with expectant recipients beforehand, she would have been told at the outset what she’s heard in public outcry since — the money will be put to good use. In education, especially, the extra funding would be in channeled through existing federal programs, which brings with it more rules and regulations regarding its use than the state or Legislature would have need or desire to create for itself. Other agencies are also more than willing to conform to the governor’s wish that the money not create costs down the road.

The state is on the right path in scrutinizing the stimulus money and safeguarding that the boon doesn’t become a burden.

But Palin would have done herself and her administration a huge favor by treading lightly down this path, instead of kicking up the dust storm that’s obscured this issue.

Pressing need — Printers offer free service to help local job seekers

2009-03-31T21:53:00.001-08:00

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Shane and Melanie Noblin are offering a new service at their business that they expect to be popular, although they hope no one needs to use it.

The Noblins, who own Peninsula Printing, are offering what they call a career assist package, where they provide 100 business cards, 50 resumes, 50 pieces of blank stationary and 50 blank envelopes for free.

The service is meant to help the unemployed search for a job, Melanie Noblin said. With the national downturn in the economy, she anticipates more people being out of work and needing to apply for employment.

“We have been seeing more businesses kind of tighten up and close down,” she said. We’re on the tail end of the economy and recession, so we’re just now going to start seeing a slowdown, if we see one.”

The Noblins saw a notice in a trade magazine they subscribe to about a print shop in Illinois that was offering free resume and business card printing to help local job seekers. The shop challenged other printers to do the same.

The Noblins decided to try it. On one hand, they’d be doing what they could to help local residents in tough times, and on the other, if no one used the service, then they could be happy that the job market is going strong, Noblin said.

“We figured we’re going to give it a shot,” she said. “We don’t have too much to lose in offering it. If it’s successful, great. If not, it’s probably even better that they didn’t need it.”

Noblin said she’s been hanging up posters advertising the service around town, including the Alaska Employment Service in Kenai.

“They were really excited and were happy to see that this was a service that was offered,” Noblin said. “You can print resumes from the job service, but what I’ve heard is it’s very limited and not extremely great quality for going out and looking for a job. It’s just a little service that they provide, but some people want something more professional.”

Noblin said she’s gotten some skepticism that there must be fees attached somewhere. She said Peninsula Printing buys paper in bulk to the point where giving away 50 resumes or 100 business cards is a negligible cost, and with computer programs making text layout so easy these days, it doesn’t take much effort.

“It really doesn’t take much time for me — 10 or 20 minutes out of my day to help someone out,” she said.

Anyone interested in the service can upload pre-typed business cards and resumes or submit unformatted text files online at www.peninsulaprinting.net. Or call Noblin for more information at 262-5267. Turnaround is one to two weeks. Orders can be picked up at the shop on K-B drive behind Save-U-More on Kalifornsky Beach Road, or shipped for $10.

The Noblins have owned Peninsula Printing since 2004, and have lived in the area for much longer. The career assist program is a business service for them. They also see it as community service.

“It only requires a little effort on our part, but could mean the world to someone without the resources they need to help secure a job. Really, in a community this small, every little bit helps, and it all circulates back to sustaining the local economy. It’s just good karma,” Noblin said.

Plugged In: Don’t let Redoubt’s ash be downfall of electronics

2009-03-31T21:51:00.000-08:00

Before concluding our series about cost-effective computer upgrades, here’s a brief word about dealing with the byproducts of our namesake across Cook Inlet, whose unpredictable geological mutterings are likewise kicking up some dust on the central Kenai Peninsula.

Volcanic emissions are potentially damaging to almost any mechanical or electrical device. Damage can occur in several ways. Although light traces of ash are not a problem, it’s wise to remember that local volcanic ash is an industrial-grade abrasive, which, in sufficient quantities, can abrade and mechanically damage engines, bearings, fans or any other rotating or mechanically actuated devices.

This can quickly cause major computer failures. For example, if the bearings on your CPU’s cooling fan fail, either your computer will shut down almost immediately or your CPU will basically suffer catastrophic heat stroke within a few seconds. Modern processors really do put out enough heat to cook themselves unless constantly and efficiently cooled. In addition to general abrasion of moving parts, other electronic devices like printers, scanners and photocopiers are highly vulnerable to mechanical scratching of interior parts and can become quickly and permanently unusable unless covered and cleaned with compressed air. Don’t try to wipe the dust off such parts and surfaces — blow it off.

Volcanic ash can also damage electronics because it’s electrically conductive, which can cause short circuits. It’s also chemically corrosive due to sulfur oxides which, when combined with atmospheric water, hydrolyze into sulfuric acid, among other noxious chemicals. That’s the same process that results in long-term toxic acid drainage from open-pit mines and mine tailings exposed to oxygen.

Even if abrasion, corrosion or short circuits don’t get you, and even if the ash doesn’t clog your computer’s cooling fans, accumulated ash and other dust is a good heat insulator, causing electronic devices to retain heat, sometimes to the point that the device fails.

I have lost high-end Western Digital Raptor hard disks because I forgot to take a computer outside every few months and thoroughly blow out any and all dust, including dust hiding on the bottom of exposed hard disk circuit boards. The older, 36-gigabyte Raptor hard disk ran pretty warm even when everything was being cooled properly. That disk didn’t have a chance when its circuit board had a nice warm insulating layer of dust. Redoubt’s ash falls will greatly increase the need for regular internal cleaning.

What to do? Appropriate precautions are quite straightforward. Monitor the Alaska Volcano Observatory’s Web site, www.avo.alaska.edu, throughout the day and evening so you’re informed about any explosive ash events and the probable trajectory for any ash that might be ejected over the next 24 hours. You can’t predict whether there will be ash at any given time but you can predict where any emissions will travel on the winds over the next 18 to 24 hours.

When there’s any chance of an ash fall coming down over your area, shut down all of your electronic equipment immediately. Also shut down any uninterruptible power supplies or other battery-operated devices to avoid possible short circuits due to conductive ash. Unplug them from the wall if you don’t have high-grade surge protectors installed. If there’s a power loss, then there’s also the possibility of damaging voltage surges when electrical power is restored. Homer Electric Association’s state-approved tariffs provide that you, the end consumer, are responsible for preventing surge damage and that HEA is not liable.

If possible, keep dust from infiltrating into your premises. Seal leaky windows with wide masking tape. Prevent ash from being tracked into your house and workplace. Put extra filters on any air intakes. For example, I put some regular furnace filters in front of the normal dust filters in my office’s air-handling system. This should provide an easily replaced second line of defense against ash being sucked into my building and being uniformly distributed by the heating system. Also consider shutting down your air-handling systems if you’re present during the day, or setting them so low at night that they’ll not activate very much, if at all, throughout the night.

Covering all electronic and sensitive mechanical equipment is obvious. For more expensive or sensitive devices, I have been fully covering the top and sides of each individual device with a 33-gallon trash bag and then covering the entire area with large, heavy-duty plastic drop cloths bought at Trustworthy Hardware. That gives me a second layer of protection. Ash slides easily, so I have been turning up the edges of the drop clothes to prevent ash from sliding off them on to whatever I am trying to protect.

You’ll need to internally clean any ash or dust regularly. Even if you’re not in the path of an obvious ash event, there’s enough circulating ash that your computer will build up a damaging layer of heat-insulating internal dust more quickly than usual. The best way to clean this dust is to buy several cans of compressed nitrogen or dried air. These are available locally at Three Bears, Save-U-More and other stores.

Unplug your computer or printer, first noting and marking where each cable attaches so that you’ll be able to reassemble the computer without any configuration problems. Then, take the entire system outside, remove each of the sliding side panels and thoroughly blow out any and all dust. In addition to obvious general dust, take particular care to clean the system board, the underside of any hard disks, all fan blades and fan housings, all power supply openings, and the air spaces between the fins on the coolers on the CPU, the video card and any smaller fans on the system board. Repeat regularly while Redoubt’s dust is floating about.

Local attorney Joe Kashi received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT and his law degree from Georgetown University. He has published many articles about computer technology, law practice and digital photography in national media since 1990. Many of his technology and photography articles can be accessed through his Web site, www.kashilaw.com.

Wild life — Kasilof duo laughs through volcanoes, Exxon during 30 years in the Bush

2009-03-24T22:43:00.012-08:00

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Mary and Bob Haeg’s version of paradise would be some people’s version of hell, or at least purgatory.

Thirty years with no running water, no electricity, no regular mail, no phone, no TV, no computer or Internet, no neighbors, no way in or out except by boat or plane.

“No stores, no roads, no people,” Bob said.

“It sure was nice,” Mary said.

“Yeah, there was no baloney. I’d still be there if I wasn’t so damn old,” Bob said.

Now in their 80s, the inevitable march of time has taken its toll on the Haegs and the subsistence life they carved out for themselves in remote Chinitna Bay across Cook Inlet and a little north of Anchor Point. Age kicked them out of their own, self-made Garden of Eden about two and a half years ago and landed them in their version of purgatory — civilization. Or as much civilization as they could stomach, anyway. They packed up what they could from their wilderness home, shipped it all across the inlet and moved into a house near the beach in Kasilof.

“Only a couple cars a day go by. It’s already too busy. But we can stand it,” Bob said.

They made the move for an easier life. One where they can stay warm without chopping wood and eat dinner without having to find it, kill it, dress it and cook it.

“We had to do with what we had, you know,” Mary said. “Now over here you can get fettuccini sauce. We never had any of that before. It’s different being able to go to the store and cook with all that stuff.”

Different surroundings have forced a different lifestyle on the Haegs, but at heart they haven’t changed much. Their activities are still governed by daylight, rather than the irrelevant numbers on a clock, and they’ll make appointments for “when it’s light out” and head home “before it gets dark.” After a few days holed up with a cold, they need to confer with each other to determine what day it is, and only then if there’s a good reason to bother knowing. Bob still makes his famous pickled salmon; he just does it with fish from a subsistence set net site on the beach near their house. The Haegs bring the “young people” lunch, and the fishermen share their catch.

Though they say they’d just as soon not have so many gal darn people around, the Haegs can’t seem to help being friendly to anyone they meet, a throwback to their years hosting tourists in Chinitna Bay after fishing went south and they opened Haeg’s Wilderness Lodge instead. At the same time, three decades spent without having to impress or get along with anyone but themselves have left the Haegs without concern about what people think of them.

They’re equally as colorful in their stories as in real life — driving a shiny black Hummer with yellow flames custom painted on the sides and wearing bright Hummer jackets to match. The custom plates say “THXXON” — a sarcastic salute to the monetary settlement they got after the Exxon Valdez oil spill ruined fishing in Chinitna Bay.

The Haegs laugh over the plates as much as they do everything in life. It’s hard to say which came first with them — their “Oh, what the hell,” attitude or their spirit of adventure. Either way, the combination has made for an interesting life.

Life on the bay

The Haegs’ decision to move to Chinitna Bay came as spur-of-the-moment as many things in their lives have. They were living on the central Kenai Peninsula at the time, in the 1970s, after Bob convinced Mary to move to Alaska. She had been living in Minnesota with her five kids when she lost her husband, who was Bob’s first cousin and best friend. She was working at a liquor store when Bob came back to visit and showed her a picture of Alaska.

“He said, ‘You know, Mary, if you ever came to Alaska you’d never go back. You’d love it,’” Mary said. “I went to lock the liquor store door one night and thought, ‘I’m going to go to Alaska.’”

She bought a Winnebago, packed up the kids and headed north. She got into Kenai late at night.

“Where did I find Bob?”

In a bar. But neither that nor anything that’s happened since has made her regret her decision to come to Alaska.

“It never entered my mind,” she said.

Bob blames Mary for the Chinitna Bay scheme, but in fairness it was only half her doing. Mary said she loves to fish, and told Bob about a set net site she’d seen on the east side of the inlet. He’s the one who went looking across the water.

“She comes home after seeing a fishing site and said, ‘We want to buy a fishing site.’ I said, ‘Sh-- we don’t need another job.’ I was paving. I never seen a fishing site, didn’t know what it was, but I’m game for anything, gal darn. I didn’t need another job and I didn’t know anything about fishing, so I said, ‘We’ve got to buy a fishing site where you can’t do anything else.’”

It wasn’t hard to find someone who knew of a site for sale matching that bill.
“Anytime you sit down and get to bullsh---ing, you’re going to start talking about fishing. If you don’t like talking about fishing, don’t live in Alaska,” Bob said. “The guy said he knew of a site, but you can’t live there. I said, ‘Oh, hell, that’s going to be interesting.’”

Bob’s cousin, George French, flew them to Chinitna Bay, a 10-mile-long inlet east of Iliamna Lake, in French’s Super Cub to check out the site. It was blowing about 70 knots out of the west, so they couldn’t see much. A beach and some trees were all Bob had to go on.

It was enough.

“We couldn’t even land the airplane it was blowing too damn hard. We flew back and said, ‘It’s just what I always wanted,’” Bob said.

In the spring of 1976, Bob and Mary packed up the few belongings and supplies they could gather and headed across the inlet by boat. The skipper dropped them on the shore and told them they had two days to haul everything up off the beach before a big tide came in.

When they first arrived there was just an 8-by-16-foot trailer house. When they packed up 30 years later, they left 10 buildings behind.

The 2.5-acre site was more than just the buildings, though. It was all as much of their home as the 34-by-34 log cabin the Haegs built and lived in. Their walls were the mountains behind them and the cliffs that cut off the beach in either direction, making it so they couldn’t walk more than two miles either direction, and so visitors had to come in by boat or plane. The laundry room was series of racks and clotheslines strung high enough to catch the breeze. Their refrigerator was the garden they planted in an old wooden dory, the berry patches they picked in the fall, the smokehouse they used for their salmon, the traplines Bob and their son, David, tended during the winter, and the rich clamming beds and fishing grounds in the bay. Their television, playing nature and wildlife shows 24-7, was everywhere they looked.

Boom, bust at sea

Fishing was mythical when the Haegs first got to the site. They set netted for salmon — kings, reds, silvers and chums. Their summers were filled with the hard work that comes from having a hot spot — mending nets, tending buoys and dealing with the flopping, flashing bounty that came in when they pulled their gear.

There was ample sportfishing, too. Halibut were easy to find. And they’d occasionally hook a king crab so big they’d swear it was a halibut until it got up to the boat.

In the winter there were tanner crab in the bay.

“When the tide would go out they’d forget to go back so you could go pick them up,” Mary said.

They had a clam beach nearly to themselves, except when a visiting pilot would mistakenly think it’d be a good spot to land and ding a prop or wreck landing gear on the rocks.

“How many planes did we pull out that tried to land in our clamming spot?” Bob asked Mary.

The Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 put a stop to that way of life. Oil balls floated up the southern reaches of Cook Inlet and invaded Chinitna Bay. Halibut, the Cook Inlet herring fishery, even the salmon runs were destroyed. They used to get 3,800 chums a day, but after the spill, a good day was 363 fish, Mary said.

“It changed quite a bit. The fishing really never did come back,” Mary said.

“Yeah, it was a mess. It still is, really. It hurt us and all we got out of them was a Hummer,” Bob said.

“Our land wasn’t worth anything because there wasn’t fishing anymore. We started taking in tourists, otherwise we couldn’t have stayed there,” Mary said.

Life off the grid

Even before the tourists, the Haegs were isolated, but they weren’t completely alone. The National Park Service created Lake Clark National Park and Preserve in 1979, extending park boundaries around the few private inholdings on the bay, including the Haegs’. The Park Service people were good neighbors, the Haegs said. They’d help out if the Haegs got in a bind, and the park made it so unauthorized fish camps couldn’t spring up on the beach and in the woods, which used to be a serious headache, Bob said.

The squatters would build plastic shacks, litter, harass wildlife, catch too many halibut, bury them until their boat showed back up and shoot the bears that were drawn in to the fish.

“Then we’d have wounded bears around. The Parks Service helped clean that dump out. We put it out on the beach, I gave them a gallon of diesel and we burned it. That was the end of that crap,” Bob said.

A citizens band radio served as a link to the outside world, on the Kenai Peninsula and much farther beyond. It was entertainment to a point, but also proved incredibly helpful on occasion, like when the Haegs’ refrigerator went on the fritz and someone from Outside talked Bob through fixing it. Or when their pet goat ate insulation and a guy on the CB talked to a vet and relayed treatment information — “We had to pour Wesson oil down his throat,” Mary said.

Marine radio kept them in periodic touch with civilization across the inlet, especially if they needed a fishing tender to haul supplies over for them or needed a flight somewhere. Bob learned to fly when he was 62, and they had their PA-12, a little bigger than a Super Cub, painted with pink flames during a trip to Soldotna.

“Oh, it didn’t fit our lifestyle, with pink flames all down the side of it, but it was a pretty airplane,” Mary said.

Their son, David, the only one of the kids to grow up in Chinitna Bay instead of leaving to attend school in town, also became a pilot.

David Haeg regularly flew supplies and equipment in and out for his parents, in all kinds of conditions. During one trip, on Jan. 24, 1990, David had guided a larger plane delivering two snowmachines out to his parents’ site, then was dropping a passenger off in Port Alsworth, which took him near Mount Redoubt just as it was erupting. Being a photography buff, he got a gorgeous shot of the mountain before getting out of there to avoid ash damage to the plane.

That luck held with all the volcanoes in the area. In the 30 years the Haegs lived at Chinitna Bay, both Redoubt and Spurr erupted and Augustine erupted twice, but not one dumped any ash on them.

Mount Augustine is a mere 30 miles south of Chinitna Bay, and the Haegs could see the steam and ash rising when it erupted in 2005.

“We could see where it blew. It went up in the air and went east and went across and dumped on you guys. Boy, that was funny. We thought we were going to get it,” Bob said.

Never a dull moment

“We had something happen all the time. There were no dull moments,” Mary said.

Animals accounted for many of those not-dull moments, and General Custer the goat was at the center of many of them. A friend from Homer told Mary she had a young goat she couldn’t take care of and wondered if Mary and Bob could keep him. Custer made himself right at home. He was housebroken, so he got to come inside. His favorite spot when he was younger was curled up on Bob’s lap in the rocking chair. When he got bigger, he liked to stand right next to the barrel stove.

“In the winter you had to watch him ’cause he’d stand next to the stove and you could smell him,’” Bob said.

Being a goat, it was a constant battle to keep him from eating things he shouldn’t, like the insulation and the entire instructions to a brand-new three-wheeler kit Bob had had delivered. Tales of General Custer traveled far and wide over the CB, prompting one woman from down south to make and send a blanket for the goat with five stars on it.

“He got promoted to a five-star general,” Mary said.

They had a series of dogs, including Howler, who would lie under the stove and howl in the middle of the night if it went out. Then there was Tasha the horse, who learned how to open the cabin door. One day Bob and Mary heard knocking on the door, and it opened to reveal Tasha with a face full of porcupine quills.

“She knew they had to come out, and she sat there and let me do it,” Bob said.

Moses the raven was an ancillary pet, adopting the Haegs rather than the other way around. Moses liked to perch on Tasha and go for rides, and the raven was deadly with clothespins when Mary hung out the laundry, and with anything shiny.

“You couldn’t put down a socket or wrench or anything shiny,” Bob said. “We never did find all those.”

Wild animals were all around, including the brown bears that became a huge draw for wildlife viewers when the Haegs and other park inholders starting hosting tourists in the 1990s.

“We lived with 20 brown bears. I never petted a live bear. I petted a lot of dead ones and I’m still alive. If you’re dumb enough to pet a live bear, they make a movie of you. If you’re smart enough to stay alive with them for 30 years, there’s nothing to that,” Bob said, referring to “The Grizzly Maze,” a documentary about amateur naturalist Timothy Treadwell, who was killed by a grizzly in Katmai National Park in 2005.

Actually, a filmmaker did think there was something to the Haegs’ life in Chinitna Bay. Nature filmmakers Bob Swerer Sr. and Bob Swerer Jr. got a hold of Mary over Marine radio about eight years ago and told her they wanted to come film a documentary about them.

“I went out and told Bob and David. They said, ‘Oh Mom, you’re just kidding us.’ But I said, ‘Yeah,’ and they came out and did it,” Mary said.

The film, “Alaska Off the Beaten Path,” is available for purchase at www.dickproenneke.com and by calling 800-737-0239. It has aired on PBS, and the Haegs sometimes get stopped in the grocery store by people asking if they’re the ones on TV. It’s a kick to see themselves on TV, Mary said, and to look back at the life they created on their own, in their own little corner of the wild.

“Oh, we had so much fun, and we’re still having fun,” Mary said. “We’ve been laughing ever since.”

Borough is ready for rumbles — Emergency management team keeps tabs on Redoubt eruption

2009-03-24T22:41:00.003-08:00

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Scott Walden usually gets up at 4:30 a.m. He was about ready to head to bed around 10 p.m. Sunday night. But when you’re the coordinator of the Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management and a volcano starts erupting across Cook Inlet, sleep can be hard to come by.

After three months of on-and-off rumbling, Mount Redoubt finally made good on its threats. The volcano began a series of eruptions at 10:38 p.m. Sunday night, followed by others at 11:02 p.m., 12:14 a.m. and 1:39 a.m., according to the Alaska Volcano Observatory. The largest blast of the morning occurred at 4:03 a.m. Monday, sending an ash cloud more than 60,000 feet — 12 miles — into the air. Another large eruption occurred at 7:41 p.m. Monday, sending another ash plume 60,000 feet into the air.

Walden’s work cell phone, a 24-hour necessity for occasions such as these, started ringing between 10 and 10:20 p.m. Sunday, he said, when it became clear Redoubt was ready to do more than just rumble.

With that, the borough’s Office of Emergency Management was in motion.
Built in 2006, the borough’s Emergency Management Center on Willow Street in Soldotna is a self-contained, state-of-the-art facility that serves as incident command center when a natural disaster or emergency strikes — be it a flood, wildfire or volcanic eruption.

It’s a huge step up from the trailer behind the Borough Building OEM used to inhabit, Walden said. Now there’s the necessary space, equipment and facilities to do what needs to be done in times of emergency.

For the most part, that’s gathering and distributing information, Walden said.

“Our job mainly is to coordinate information to get accurate information out,” he said. “We don’t create the information so much as contribute to the creation of it.”

OEM is the borough’s link to the agencies and experts monitoring the situation — in this case, primarily the Alaska Volcano Observatory and the National Weather Service. OEM also is the point of coordination between Anchorage, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough and any other areas of the state facing the same situation, and the multitude of departments, organizations and agencies that have a hand in weathering the storm — the Federal Aviation Administration, National Guard and Alaska Department of Transportation, to name a few.

It’s a two-way interface, with OEM getting updates from the volcano observatory and the weather service on eruption activities, ash cloud trajectory and weather forecasts, and being expected to return the favor if the borough has any information to report, such as ash fall observations.

“We get a lot of e-mails from people saying ‘Redoubt is erupting, there’s ash fall in Safeway parking lot.’ And I go and look, if need be,” Walden said. “We got reports of ash fall here around 2 o’clock (a.m.). I looked again, and of course it wasn’t happening.”

In a situation like Redoubt that’s happening beyond the borough’s boundaries, OEM’s main role is to disseminate information. OEM gathers updates on volcanic activity and ash fall advisories — basically, everything everyone needs to know — posts them to the borough’s OEM Web site, e-mails them to an extensive list of contacts in the media and community, updates the borough administration and department heads, the school district, hospitals, service areas, emergency response agencies, maintenance departments and a long list of others across the borough that most people wouldn’t even think of. But OEM does.

“If there is a really bad situation, we’ll let everybody know what’s going on,” Walden said.

The OEM office is staffed 24 hours a day for the duration of an emergency and has different levels of response it can escalate to, up to having 30 or 40 people working around the clock, with 100 extra phone lines patched in and a chaplain at the ready for the community, if need be.

The Redoubt eruption had staff at the lowest level of response, Walden said. Extra personnel were brought in to answer phones, which were ringing off the hook for about 40 minutes when power to all Homer Electric Association customers across the peninsula — 28,000 meters — went out around 8 a.m. Monday. Though it was just a coincidence, people assumed it was caused by the volcano erupting, Walden said.

Joe Gallagher, spokesman for Homer Electric Association, said the outage was caused by an unknown problem with the transmission line between Anchorage and the peninsula. Engineers were working Monday to determine what exactly happened, Gallagher said.

“We don’t have any reason whatsoever to link this to the ash fall,” he said.
Heavy ash fall could potentially cause a problem if it accumulated on power lines, transformers or electric facilities, Gallagher said, but that would only cause a localized outage.

“We’ve had experience with ash fall in the past. It’s never been anything where we had to shut down the system or anything like that. There’s been instances of isolated arcs, where in fact ash did get into the system, but it was isolated to distinct spots,” he said.

The transmission line was brought back online by 10 a.m., and the system was fully restored by 10:40 a.m.

Other than that curve ball, the day went smoothly, Walden said. The school district was apprised of eruption activity and ash plume trajectory early in the morning, and decided by 5 a.m. to go ahead with school. All the communications systems and information releases came in and went out as expected. Mother Nature even cooperated, from the Kenai Peninsula’s perspective, in keeping a steady wind out of the northeast that spared the Kenai from ash fall.

It was a relatively undisastrous disaster, even for the areas that were directly affected, like the Susitna Valley. Ash fall was light, Walden said, probably lighter than the images people conjure up about it.

“A trace amount is under a millimeter. Medium ash fall is one to three millimeters. When you realize a trash bag is 10 millimeters, that’s not a lot of ash. If we got significantly dumped on, that might be as much as a dime,” he said.

Even small amounts of ash can be a big problem, though. If mixed with snow, ash can contribute to roof collapses and other weight-bearing issues. It’s a health risk if inhaled, especially for people with respiratory problems. It can turn roads into Slip ’n’ Slides and wreak havoc with delicate machinery and electronics.

That’s probably the biggest difference between this eruption and the last time Redoubt was active — the amount of electronics equipment in use.

“Even the grocery store, you don’t have someone who figures out your bill and gives you a receipt, it’s all electronic,” Walden said. “That kind of stuff needs to be looked at now, whereas 20 years ago it wasn’t a concern. Nowadays it’s vital.”

Other than the rash of calls during the blackout, the emergency center was relatively quiet, Walden said. People seemed to know how to get information and were already prepared in the event of an ash fall.

“We did a lot of public information before the eruption about what people should do, so when something like this occurs you don’t have people panicking,” Walden said.

People Outside seem more concerned about the eruptions than locals, Walden said, probably due to imaginations or sensationalized news coverage running wild.

“It’s just kind of an unusual situation to have a volcano in your backyard. The image of what a volcano does and what we’ve seen it actually do are two different things,” Walden said.

“For the most part people are pretty reasonable. They listen and don’t react too much to what cable television is telling them.”

Image courtesy of Game McGimsey, Alaska Volcano Observatory / U.S. Geological Survey
Flooding and tephra deposits — volcano-produced, airborne material that settles on the ground, churn down the Drift River Valley off Mount Redoubt after eruptions Monday.