Alaska

Alaska Natives want the US military to clean up its toxic waste

Published

9 months ago

March 19, 2025

Alaska Natives want the US military to clean up its toxic waste

In June 1942, Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian islands in Alaska prompted the U.S. military to activate the Alaska territorial guard, an Army reserve made up of volunteers who wanted to help protect the U.S. So many of the volunteers were from Alaska’s Indigenous peoples — Aleut, Inupiak, Yupik, Tlingit, and many others — that the guard was nicknamed the “Eskimo Scouts.”

When World War II ended and the reserve force ceased operations in 1947, the U.S. approached the Indigenous Yupik people of Alaska with another ask: Could the Air Force set up “listening posts” on the island of Sivuqaq, also known as St. Lawrence Island, to help with the intelligence gathering needed to win the Cold War?

Viola Waghiyi, who is Yupik from Sivuqaq, said the answer was a resounding yes.

“Our grandfathers and fathers volunteered for the Alaska territorial guard,” she said. “We were very patriotic.”

But that trust was abused, Waghiyi said. The U.S. military eventually abandoned its Air Force and Army bases, leaving the land polluted with toxic chemicals such as fuel, mercury, and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, that are known as “forever chemicals” because they persist so long in the environment. The contamination was largely due to spilled and leaking fuel from storage tanks and pipes, both above ground and below ground. More chemical waste came from electrical transformers, abandoned metals and 55-gallon drums.

Now, Waghiyi is the environmental health and justice program director at the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, an organization dedicated to limiting the effects of toxic substances on Alaska’s residents and environment. Last week, the organization filed a complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, in partnership with the U.C. Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic.

Their complaint calls for the United Nations to investigate how military waste on Sivuqaq continues to violate the rights of the people who live there, such as the right to a clean and healthy environment and Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land.

“By exposing the Yupik people of Sivuqaq to polluted drinking water sources, air, and soil, and by contaminating local native foods; by causing pervasive human exposure to hazardous chemicals through multiple routes; by toxifying the broader ecosystem; and by not cleaning up contamination sufficiently to protect human health and the environment, the U.S. Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers violated human rights long recognized in international law,” the complaint says.

This submission from Alaska is part of a larger, global effort to raise awareness of military toxic waste by the United Nations. The U.N. special rapporteur on toxics and human rights is collecting public input on military activities and toxic waste until April 1. The information collected will be used in a report presented to the U.N. General Assembly in October.

The two shuttered bases in Sivuqaq, Alaska, are now classified as “formerly used defense,” or FUD, sites, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and more than $130 million has been spent to remove the contamination. John Budnick, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska, said the cleanup is considered complete but that the agency is reviewing the site every five years “to ensure the selected remedies continue to be protective of human health and the environment.”

“We have completed the work at Northeast Cape, but additional follow-up actions may result from the monitoring phase of the Formerly Used Defense Sites Program,” he said. The last site visit occurred last July and an updated review report is expected to be released this summer.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, similarly concluded in 2013 that an additional EPA cleanup wouldn’t significantly differ from what the Army Corps of Engineers is doing and declined to place the sites on the EPA’s list of hazardous waste cleanup priorities.

A 2022 study found that so far, federal cleanup efforts have been inadequate. “High levels of persistent organic pollutants and toxic metals continue to leach from the Northeast Cape FUD site despite large-scale remediation that occurred in the early 2000s,” the authors concluded.

The persisting pollution has garnered the attention of Alaska’s state Dept. of Environmental Conservation which oversees the cleanup of contaminated sites. Stephanie Buss, contaminated sites program manager at the agency, said her office has asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do additional cleanup at Northeast Cape.

“These active contaminated sites have not met closure requirements,” she said. The second former base, Gambell, was classified as completed but still lacks land use controls, she noted.

“DEC takes community health concerns seriously and will continue to provide oversight of the conditions at its active sites in accordance with the state’s regulatory framework to ensure an appropriate response that protects human health and welfare,” Buss said.

That same 2022 study found that 89 percent of the fish around the Northeast Cape base contained mercury exceeding the levels the EPA deemed appropriate for people who rely on subsistence fishing. “All fish sampled near the FUD site exceeded the EPA’s PCB guidelines for cancer risk for unrestricted human consumption,” the researchers further found. Waghiyi said the contamination displaced 130 people, and has left her friends and family with a lasting legacy of illness.

“It’s not a matter of if we’ll get cancer, but when,” Waghiyi said. Her father died of cancer. Her mother had a stillborn child. Waghiyi herself is a cancer survivor and has had three miscarriages.

“We feel that they have turned their back on us,” Waghiyi said of the U.S. military. “We wanted our lands to be turned back in the same condition when they turned over.”

The U.S. military has a long history of contaminating lands and waters through military training and battles sites, including on Indigenous lands. Citizens of the Navajo Nation in Arizona and Yakama Nation in Washington continue to raise concerns about the ongoing effects of military nuclear testing on their lands and health. In the Marshall Islands, fishing around certain atolls is discouraged due to high rates of toxicity due to nuclear testing and other military training. On Guam, chemicals from an active Air Force base have contaminated parts of the islandʻs sole-source aquifer that serves 70% of the population. Last year, a federal report found that climate change threatens to unearth even more U.S. military nuclear waste in both the Marshall Islands and Greenland.

In 2021, the Navy in Hawaiʻi poisoned 90,000 people when jet fuel leached from aging, massive underground storage tanks into the drinking water supply after the Navy ignored years of warning to upgrade the tanks or remove the fuel. The federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to remove unexploded ordnance from the island of Kahoʻolawe, a former bombing range in Hawaiʻi, but the island is still considered dangerous to walk on because of the risk of more ordnance unearthing due to extensive erosion.

The complaint filed last week by the Alaska Community Action on Toxics calls for the United Nations to write to U.S. federal and state agencies and call upon them to honor a 1951 agreement between the U.S. government and the Sivuqaq Yupik people that prohibited polluting the land.

The agreement said that the Sivuqaq Tribes would allow the Air Force to construct surveillance sites to spy on the Soviet Union, but they had four conditions, including allowing Indigenous peoples to continue to hunt, fish and trap where desired and preventing outsiders from killing their game. Finally, the agreement said that “any refuse or garbage will not be dumped in streams or near the beach within the proposed area.”

“The import of the agreement was clear: The military must not despoil the island; must protect the resources critical to Indigenous Yupik inhabitants’ sustenance; and must leave the island in the condition they found it, which ensured their health and well-being,” the Alaska Community Action on Toxics wrote in their complaint.

“This is a burden we didn’t create,” Waghiyi said.

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Alaska

Record cold temperatures for Juneau with a change to Western Alaska

Published

2 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

Record cold temperatures for Juneau with a change to Western Alaska

ANCHORAGE, AK (Alaska’s News Source) – Overnight lows in Juneau have hit a two streak for breaking records!

Sunday tied the previous record lowest high temperature of 10 degrees set back in 1961, with clear skies and still abnormally cold temperatures to kick off Christmas week. Across the panhandle, clear and cold remains the trend but approaching Christmas Day, snow potential may return to close out the work week.

Download the free Alaska’s News Source Weather App.

In Western Alaska, Winter Storm Warnings are underway beginning as early as tonight for the Seward Peninsula. Between 5 to 10 inches of snow are forecasted across Norton Sound from Monday morning through midnight Monday as wind gusts build to 35 mph. In areas just slightly north, like Kotzebue, a Winter Storm Warning will remain in effect from Monday morning to Wednesday morning. Kotzebue and surrounding areas will brace for 6 to 12 inches of possible snow accumulation over the course of 3 mornings with gusts up to 40 miles per hour.

Southcentral could potentially see record low high temperatures for Monday as highs in Anchorage are forecasted in the negatives. Across the region, clear skies will stick around through Christmas with subsiding winds Monday morning.

Send us your weather photos and videos here!

Interior Alaska is next up on the ‘changing forecast’ list as a Winter Storm Watch will be in effect Tuesday afternoon through Thursday morning. With this storm watch, forecasted potential of 5 to 10 inches of snow will coat the North Star Borough. For those in Fairbanks, 1 to 3 inches of snow will likely fall Tuesday night into Wednesday, just in time for Christmas Eve! Until then, mostly sunny skies will dominate the Interior with things looking just a bit cloudier past the Brooks Range. The North Slope will stay mostly cloudy to start the work week with some morning snow likely for Wainwright.

The Aleutian Chain is another overcast region with mostly cloudy skies and light rain for this holiday week. Sustained winds will range from 15 to 20 miles per hour with gusts up to 35 mph in Cold Bay.

24/7 Alaska Weather: Get access to live radar, satellite, weather cameras, current conditions, and the latest weather forecast here. Also available through the Alaska’s News Source streaming app available on Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV.

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Alaska

Alaska is awash in oil but lies on an even more valuable resource — Switzerland has just started to produce it in a frenzy

Published

14 hours ago

December 21, 2025

Press Room

Alaska is awash in oil but lies on an even more valuable resource — Switzerland has just started to produce it in a frenzy

Alaska’s energy realm has been dominated by oil resources, but with the state awash in oil, Alaska is relying on another valuable resource. Buried beneath the layers of snow lies one of the most underestimated sources of clean power. Since Switzerland has set the tone of relying on solar power enhanced by snow itself, the country is offering some light on how snowy regions can depend on this valuable resource as well. With Alaska being filled with snow, the state could even become fossil fuel independent by relying on solar potential and its snow.

Swiss solar invention considering the strength of snow power

Switzerland has considered solar energy technology created for snow climates. Researchers as well as engineers have seen that solar panels in the Alps do benefit so much from the snow that their performance is improved. Shocking enough, solar panels perform well during the winter months when energy demand tends to be high.

The discovery of solar panels’ feat is because sunlight reflected off snow improves the radiation that reaches the panels. The best way this effect is reflected is through the AlpinSolar Project on the Muttsee Dam. The site can produce 3.3 GWh every year, which is rather similar to the energy generated by solar systems at low elevation levels. These alpine-based panels generate three times more electricity than installations in Switzerland’s lower regions, and this is mainly the case due to the snowy reflected layer.

It has been found that perhaps steep angles and panel spacing optimize sunlight absorption, as this placement enables snow to slide off panels easily whilst ensuring sunlight capture from reflective panels.

Alaska is looking at relying on the snow’s potential

According to research, the bifacial solar panels, which collect sunlight on both sides, can capture more reflected energy and show better solar output in comparison to traditional single-sided panels. This will be a great idea in Alaska, where snow cover exists for many months.

Tests conducted in Alaska were promising, and snow build-up on panels was effectively managed. Teams at the University of Alaska and Sandia National Laboratories created transparent ice- and snow-phobic coatings, where panels could shed snow and ice and improve solar energy production. In fact, energy production was improved by 85% during tests. While there is hope of solar success, the challenge seems far harder in Alaska in comparison to the Swiss Alps. With low sun angles being a reality in winter months, energy storage needs to be improved, should solar be a reliable clean energy source for Alaska.

Three lessons learnt from Switzerland that can be used in Alaska

Switzerland’s successes in alpine solar technology provide an incentive for Switzerland to tap into underrated clean energy sources, too. However, the lessons learnt in Switzerland can be used in Alaska as well:

Installation design matters considerably: Steep panel angles and higher frames enable snow shedding while ensuring better reflection of surfaces.
Adapted technologies, including bifacial panels and those with special coatings, optimize solar capture: In high latitude and snow conditions, such innovations tend to improve solar power capture.
The solar system must be integrated with storage and grid systems: This ensures that solar becomes a strategic investment in places, like Alaska, where winter darkness seems to be apparent all year long.

If Alaska keeps these core solar lessons in mind, the state can tap into this form of renewable energy.

Alaska will be able to tap into its renewable energy potential

Alaska needs to consider the snow as an asset in its solar mission, as opposed to seeing snow as a foe to the renewable energy agenda. Alaska, like Switzerland, can move forward with this renewable energy resource. While Switzerland has been relying on this resource for a while with favorable results, Alaska, too, can embrace the snow. Soon, the Alps will be covered with solar panels with amazing results.

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Alaska

There will be more nonstop flight options for Alaska travelers in 2026

Published

1 day ago

December 21, 2025

Press Room

There will be more nonstop flight options for Alaska travelers in 2026

Alaska Airlines passenger jets parked at Concourse C at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. (Bill Roth / ADN)

When it’s time to plan a trip, there are a couple of key considerations: How do you get there and how much does it cost?

Alaska travelers take it for granted that most big trips include a stop and a layover in Seattle. That’s certainly true for more international journeys, unless the trip includes a flight to Frankfurt on Condor’s nonstop from Anchorage.

But that mandatory Seattle stop is changing, even though there will be 27 nonstop flights each day this summer.

While ticket prices change on the fly, the process of blocking out where a plane will fly takes time and effort. There are many moving parts, including crew, ground handling and maintenance.

So the airlines have been working on new summertime flights since earlier this fall. And the lineup is pretty good. There’s also some welcome news on the airfare front.

Just a few days ago. Alaska Airlines announced plans to fly nonstop from Anchorage to three new destinations this summer: Boston, Spokane and Boise. Travelers prefer to fly nonstop. It’s faster and there are fewer opportunities to avoid missed connections, lost bags and other possible trip interruptions along the way.

The flights to Boston start on Saturday, June 13, 2026. There’s just one flight per week this year, which is one way Alaska Airlines tests out a route.

Alaska Air plans two flights per week (on Wednesdays and Saturdays) between Anchorage and both Boise and Spokane, starting on Wednesday, June 10.

Two other nonstop routes from Anchorage that had once-a-week service last summer now will get two flights per week: Anchorage-San Diego, starting May 16, and Anchorage-Sacramento, starting June 13.

Three Alaska Air destinations will get one flight per day, starting May 13: Anchorage-San Francisco, Anchorage-Denver and Fairbanks-Portland. That’s the same date that Alaska upgrades its Anchorage-Las Vegas from two flights a week to daily service, in response to Southwest Air’s nonstops starting May 15. The Anchorage-Los Angeles schedule also increases on that date (May 13) from one to two daily flights.

More nonstops come online on June 10: Anchorage-Minneapolis and Anchorage-New York/JFK. Also on that date, the Anchorage-Chicago schedule increases from one to two daily flights.

Alaska Airlines also offers daily nonstops to Phoenix and Honolulu. Between Anchorage and Portland, Alaska offers five daily flights during the summer.

Delta Air Lines is resuming several popular nonstop flights from Anchorage in May: Anchorage-Detroit (May 21), Anchorage-Salt Lake City (May 16) and Anchorage-Los Angeles (May 22).

Delta offers year-round nonstops from Anchorage-Seattle (3-6 daily flights), Fairbanks-Seattle (1-2 daily flights), Anchorage-Minneapolis (1-3 flights per day) and Anchorage-Atlanta (Saturdays only).

Delta’s Anchorage-Atlanta flights feature a wide-body Boeing 767 plane with lie-flat “Delta One” suites, one of just a few domestic routes. Delta resumes daily Anchorage-Atlanta flights on May 21.

American Airlines’ nonstop flight from Anchorage to Dallas operates through Jan. 6, 2026. Then there’s a two-month gap before the flight start up again on March 8.

On May 21, American Airlines resumes daily service on two routes: Anchorage-Chicago and Anchorage-Phoenix.

United Airlines flies from Anchorage to Denver each evening year-round. On May 21, United will start flying three times each day, in response to Southwest Air’s new nonstop which starts on May 15. On June 26, Denver adds a fourth daily Anchorage-Denver nonstop, just in case Southwest didn’t get the message.

May 21 also is the day United resumes its daily nonstops to Newark, Washington, D.C., and Houston.

On March 5, United resumes its nonstop flight from Anchorage to Chicago. On April 30, United adds a second flight for the summer.

Up in Fairbanks, United resumes daily flights to Chicago on April 30 and to Denver on May 21.

[Workouts at the airport? Some fliers can already smell the sweat.]

Other airlines planning nonstops to Anchorage include Sun Country, with one to two daily flights to Minneapolis starting May 16, WestJet with two weekly nonstops from Anchorage to Calgary and Southwest, with daily flights to both Denver and Phoenix. Condor Airlines plans three flights per week from Anchorage to Frankfurt starting May 16.

A big driver for the additional flights is the cruise industry, which is on track for a robust 2026 season. There are several new entrants in the cruise market, including MSC cruises, Virgin Voyages, Windstar Cruises and Azamara.

Still, airline watchers speculate there will be plenty of capacity in the interstate jet market, which means fares will be cheaper.

One example right now: Delta offers Basic Economy fares between Anchorage and Seattle for $196 round-trip. Travel between Jan. 12 and March 31. The upcharge to Main Cabin for advance seat assignment and mileage credit is $80 round-trip. Alaska Airlines quickly matched the Basic fare, but Alaska charges more for the upcharge to Main: $100 round-trip.

United Airlines is getting in on the discount fares, offers cheap rates to three Florida destinations from Anchorage: Tampa, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale. All are available for $336 round-trip is Basic Economy. Remember, with United, you cannot even take a small carry-on aboard without getting charged extra. The upcharge to Main is $100 round-trip.

After Delta dropped the fare to Seattle, Alaska Airlines dropped its rates to Delta hubs in Salt Lake City, Atlanta and Detroit. But there’s a twist.

Between Anchorage and Atlanta, Alaska Air is offering Basic fares for as little as $343 round-trip. Fly between Jan. 21 and Feb. 14. But the upcharge to Main is crazy: $175 round-trip. The price from Anchorage to Detroit on Alaska Air is compelling: just $341 round-trip. But the upcharge to Main is a buzzkill: $198 round-trip.

The Basic rate on Alaska Air between Anchorage and Salt Lake is sweet: $264 round-trip. The upcharge to Main is sour: $169 round-trip.

[Smaller items don’t go in overhead bins. Flight attendants are cracking down.]

In fairness, Delta also is guilty of overcharging for the upcharge to Main.

Between Anchorage and Boston, Delta is offering Basic seats for $336 round-trip, traveling between Jan. 9-March 31. The upcharge to Main is $100 round-trip.

But it’s a different story with tickets to Washington, D.C. Delta dangles a great price for Basic: $344 round-trip. But then comes the sticker shock on the upcharge to Main: $180 round-trip.

There still are a couple of golden rules when it comes to shopping for airline tickets:

1. When airlines are mad at each other, the traveler wins.

2. The big print giveth and the fine print taketh away.

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