Tag Archives: Alaska

COVID infections dropping throughout the Americas, says health agency

BRASILIA (Reuters) – The number of new COVID-19 infections has been dropping over the past month throughout the Americas, even though only 37% of the people in Latin America and the Caribbean have been fully vaccinated, the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said on Wednesday.

However, Alaska has the most serious outbreak in the United States today that is overwhelming emergency rooms, and while South America is continuing to see a drop in infections, Chile has seen a jump in cases in the capital Santiago and port cities Coquimbo and Antofagasta.

PAHO has closed vaccine supply agreements with Sinovac Biotech Inc and AstraZeneca Plc for delivery this year and next and with China’s Sinopharm for 2022, the agency’s director Carissa Etienne told reporters.

(Reporting by Anthony Boadle)

Pacific tsunami warnings lifted after big quake in Alaska

By Shubham Kalia and Yereth Rosen

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) -Tsunami warnings were lifted for Alaska and the rest of Pacific after a huge earthquake of 8.2 magnitude struck the seismically active U.S. state in the late hours on Wednesday.

In Alaska, small tsunami waves measuring under a foot above tide level were observed in Sand Point, Old Harbor, King Cove, Kodiak, Unalaska and Alitak Bay, according to the U.S. National Tsunami Warning Center (NTWC).

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage to property. Several Alaskan coastal communities were evacuated following the quake. Among them was Seward on the Kenai Peninsula, south of Anchorage, where sirens blared and residents were told to move to higher ground.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said the quake, which struck at 10:15 p.m. local time (0615 GMT Thursday), was at a depth of 35 km. It struck about 91 km east-southeast of Perryville, about 800 km (500 miles) from Anchorage, Alaska’s biggest city.

The U.S. states of California, Oregon and Washington and the Canadian province of British Columbia were not expected to see any significant tsunami threats, Dave Snider, tsunami warning coordinator with the NTWC, told Reuters.

“There might be some minor damage in some places (in Alaska), but a significant tsunami and significant damage from something like that is not expected,” Snider said.

While shallow earthquakes near populated areas can be dangerous, in this case the shallow quake posed less of a threat because they do not usually generate large tsunamis.

“That’s really fortunate in this case, because 8.2 is really strong enough to make a sizable wave, especially in that location of the world,” Snider added.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center (PTWC) cancelled warnings issued for Hawaii and the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam, while the public broadcaster NHK said there was no risk to Japan. Authorities in New Zealand also said they did not expect any flooding in coastal areas.

According to the USGS, the quake was followed by over 25 aftershocks in the region, with two around magnitude 6.0.

The quake was the seventh largest in U.S. history, tied with another Alaskan quake from 1938, according to USGS data. It is also the largest quake in North America since an Alaskan quake of 8.7 magnitude in 1965, according to USGS data.

(Reporting by Shubham Kalia in Bengaluru and Yereth Rosen in Anchorage, Alaska and Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, California; Additional reporting by Maria Ponnezhath, Aishwarya Nair, Radhika Anilkumar and Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru, Antoni Slodkowski in Tokyo ; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Toby Chopra)

Oregon wildfire displaces 2,000 residents as blazes flare across U.S. West

By Deborah Bloom

KLAMATH FALLS, Oregon (Reuters) -Hand crews backed by water-dropping helicopters struggled on Thursday to suppress a huge wildfire that displaced roughly 2,000 residents in southern Oregon, the largest among dozens of blazes raging across the drought-stricken western United States.

The Bootleg fire has charred more than 227,000 acres (91,860 hectares) of desiccated timber and brush in and around the Fremont-Winema National Forest since erupting on July 6 about 250 miles (400 km) south of Portland.

That total, exceeding the land mass of New York City, was 12,000 acres higher than Wednesday’s tally. Strike teams have carved containment lines around 7% of the fire’s perimeter, up from 5% a day earlier, but Incident Commander Joe Hessel said the blaze would continue to expand.

“The extremely dry vegetation and weather are not in our favor,” Hessel said on Twitter.

More than 1,700 firefighters and a dozen helicopters were assigned to the blaze, with demand for personnel and equipment across the Pacific Northwest beginning to strain available resources, said Jim Gersbach, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Forestry.

“It’s uncommon for us to reach this level of demand on firefighting resources this early” in the season, he said.

Firefighter Garrett Souza, 42, a resident of the nearby town of Chiloquin, said Wednesday he and his team spent 39 hours straight on the “initial attack” of the fire last week.

“It’s the cumulative fatigue that really, I think, wears a person out over time,” he told Reuters, as he took a break from hacking at hotspots in the burn area.

No serious injuries have been linked to the Bootleg fire, officials said, but it has destroyed at least 21 homes and 54 other structures, and forced an estimated 2,000 people from several hundred dwellings placed under evacuation. Nearly 2,000 homes were threatened.

LARGEST OF MANY WILDFIRES

The Bootleg ranks as the largest by far of 70 major active wildfires listed on Thursday as having affected nearly 1 million acres in 11 states, the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, reported. It was also the sixth-largest on record in Oregon since 1900, according to state forestry figures.

Other states hard hit by the latest spate of wildfires include California, Idaho, Montana and Alaska.

As of Wednesday, the center in Boise put its “national wildland fire preparedness level” at 5, the highest of its five-tier scale, meaning most U.S. firefighting resources are currently deployed somewhere across the country.

The situation represents an unusually busy start to the annual fire season, coming amid extremely dry conditions and record-breaking heat that has baked much of the West in recent weeks.

Scientists have said the growing frequency and intensity of wildfires are largely attributable to prolonged drought that is symptomatic of climate change.

One newly ignited blaze drawing attention on Thursday was the Dixie fire, which erupted on Wednesday in Butte County, California, near the mountain town of Paradise, still rebuilding from a 2018 firestorm that killed 85 people and destroyed nearly 19,000 structures in the state’s deadliest wildfire disaster.

The Dixie fire has charred about 2,250 acres (910 hectares) in its first 24 hours as some 500 personnel battled the blaze, which was spreading across a steep, rocky tree-filled terrain about 85 miles (140 km) north of Sacramento.

Erik Wegner of the U.S. Forest Service said dense stands of dead and dying trees created highly combustible conditions for the blaze. “It took off really fast,” he told Reuters.

Authorities have issued evacuation orders and warnings for several small communities in the area.

In Washington state, firefighters have contained about 20% of a lightning-caused fire near Nespelem, which has burned nearly 23,000 acres (9,270 hectares) northeast of Seattle since Monday, mostly on tribal lands of the Colville Reservation.

There were no injuries, but the blaze killed some livestock, destroyed three houses and forced evacuations of several others, officials said.

(Reporting by Deborah Bloom in Klamath Falls, Oregon; Additional reporting by David Ryder in Nespelem, Washington, and Mathieu Lewis Rolland in Butte County, California; Writing and additional reporting by Peter Szekely and Steve Gorman; Editing by David Gregorio, Daniel Wallis and Chris Reese)

Native health providers drive Alaska’s vaccination success story

By Yereth Rosen

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) Despite its sprawling geography and often-inhospitable climate, Alaska ranks among the top U.S. states for getting COVID-19 vaccine into the arms of its residents, and its indigenous population has played a major role in that achievement.

With a history and culture deeply shaped by deadly outbreaks of disease that have periodically ravaged remote corners of their subarctic homeland, Alaska Natives have aggressively led the way on inoculations against COVID-19 for the state as a whole.

Through their federally recognized sovereign powers, Alaska Native tribes has secured larger vaccine supplies from the U.S. Indian Health Service (IHS) than the state government has obtained for itself, said Tiffany Zulkosky, a Yup’ik and state legislator from the southwestern Alaska community of Bethel.

As a result, tribal health organizations primarily serving indigenous communities – representing just 18% of the state’s 730,000 inhabitants – have played an outsized role in the state’s overall vaccine campaign.

Acting Anchorage Mayor Austin Quinn-Davidson, who is white, tweeted a photo of herself getting a shot courtesy of a Native organization in early March.

“Alaska is leading the country in vaccinations because of the incredible work and generosity of our Tribal partners,” she wrote.

By early April, more than 42% of all Alaska residents aged 16 and older had received at least a first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, ranking near the top among states with the highest rates of inoculation per capita and by percentage of population.

The percentages run higher in regions dominated by Native populations, which have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic.

Although precise figures are hard to come by, a significant number of shots received by the general public come from the IHS supply or are being administered by tribal networks, said Zulkosky, a vice president of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp, which serves a region the size of Oregon.

Besides the impetus of achieving herd immunity, “there is that cultural value of sharing and taking care of one another,” she said.

In some extremely remote Native villages vaccination rates are now approaching 90 percent, according to state data. Tribal providers prioritized those villages for early vaccine delivery because they tend to have limited medical services and often lack modern plumbing and sewage systems.

‘OVERWHELMING HAPPINESS’

Karma Ulvi, tribal leader in the onetime gold rush outpost of Eagle, home to about 120 people – half of them Alaska Natives – on the Yukon River near the Canadian border, said the arrival of vaccines there came as a great relief.

By early April, nearly the entire community was vaccinated, Ulvi told Reuters, stressing the importance of immunization in a place where only about three in every 20 households have running water, making good hand hygiene difficult.

“There was just an overwhelming happiness among people here that received it,” she said of the vaccines.

With limited phone and internet service and no wintertime road access, the nearest hospital is at least three hours away by aircraft. Even then “it’s very hard to be in touch with the plane if there’s an accident or if someone is sick,” Ulvi said.

To reach such communities, tribal health providers used bush planes, boats, snow machines and even sleds.

The campaign hearkened back to the famous 1925 Serum Run, when a dog-sled relay delivered life-saving diphtheria medicine to Nome. The Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp dubbed its COVID-19 vaccine-delivery system Project Togo, after a celebrated lead dog in the storied serum run.

CULTURAL SURVIVAL

Alaska Natives imposed some of the nation’s earliest and most robust lockdowns, mask mandates and other rules to curb the pandemic. The virus reached rural sites nonetheless, with some devastating results. Indigenous people accounted for 37 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the state last year, more than twice their proportion of the population, according to the state epidemiology office.

The Native COVID-19 death rate was nearly four times that for white Alaskans, according to state data.

The present-day tribal response is also colored by memories of past trauma, including the 1918 influenza pandemic that shattered Native communities, virtually wiping out entire villages.

The “Great Flu” is a particularly vivid cultural loss, said PJ Simon, chairman of the Tanana Chiefs Conference, a consortium of Athabascan tribes in interior Alaska.

“Some families will never know their last name because they all died,” he told Reuters. “People were reeling. Sometimes just a kid or a boy or girl survived and the rest of the family died and everyone else was trying to get back to normal, much like we are trying to do right now.”

New York lowers coronavirus vaccine eligibility age to 50

NEW YORK (Reuters) -New York will join a handful of U.S. states that have lowered their eligibility age for coronavirus vaccines to 50, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced on Monday.

The state, the country’s fourth most populous, had restricted eligibility to residents who are at least 60 years old, have pre-existing health conditions or are essential workers, especially those who come in contact with the public.

“We are dropping the age and vaccinating more people,” Cuomo said at a church in Mount Vernon, New York, where he launched a campaign to encourage houses of worship to make themselves available as vaccination sites.

With the change, which takes effect on Tuesday, New York joins Florida, the third largest state, which lowered its eligibility age on Monday, and a handful of other states that have made vaccines available to healthy people who are 50 years old or younger.

In Arizona, Governor Doug Ducey lowered the eligibility age to 16 at state-run vaccination sites in three populous southern counties, effective Wednesday. Three other counties already have eligibility at 16, but most are at 55.

Alaska has the lowest statewide eligibility age at 16. Its vaccination rate is among the highest in the country, with 31.5% of its residents having received at least one dose, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

New York has administered at least one dose to 26.1% of its residents and Florida has administered it to 23.8%, according to the CDC, which updated its data on Sunday.

Nationwide, the CDC said 24.9% of U.S. residents have received at least one dose of a vaccine, and 13.5% are fully vaccinated.

(Reporting by Peter Szekely in New York; editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Alaska becomes first U.S. state to make vaccine available to everyone 16 and older

By Yereth Rosen

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) – Alaska has become the first U.S. state to make COVID-19 vaccines available to anyone age 16 or older, eliminating eligibility requirements for people who work or live in the state.

Governor Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, announced the new rules on Tuesday for his state of about 730,000 people. More than one quarter of Alaskans have received at least one vaccine shot, second only to New Mexico, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Certain regions of Alaska are nearing a 90% vaccination rate among elderly people, officials said.

Many states are struggling to meet the vast demand for vaccines. Differing eligibility requirements have created a patchwork system, with certain states still restricting vaccines to adults 65 or older, along with people in high-risk groups.

The COVID-19 vaccines developed by Moderna and Johnson & Johnson are approved only for people age 18 and older, but younger Alaskans can receive the Pfizer vaccine.

Officials hope that making vaccinations widely available will boost the crucial tourism industry ahead of the summer.

“Alaska’s also somewhat of a seasonal state with regard to aspects of the economy,” Dunleavy said at a news conference. “We’re hoping that we can get the cruise ships back there, the tourism industry back here.”

As of Tuesday morning, more than 123 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccines had been distributed in the United States and 93.7 million shots had been administered, according to the CDC.

(Reporting by Yereth Rosen; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Will Dunham)

Sullivan wins re-election in Alaska, giving Republicans 50 seats in Senate: Edison Research

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Republican Senator Dan Sullivan of Alaska won re-election, Edison Research projected on Wednesday, leaving control of the Senate to be determined in January by two runoff elections in Georgia.

Sullivan, 55, defeated Al Gross, an independent who ran as a Democrat in an election that some political analysts had seen as a potential opportunity for Democrats to capture a Republican seat.

Coming a day after Republican Senator Thom Tillis won re-election in North Carolina, Sullivan’s victory confirms that Democratic hopes of winning a majority of seats, and with it the power to support Democratic President-elect Joe Biden’s agenda, will come down to two Georgia elections scheduled for Jan. 5.

With Biden’s White House victory, Democrats need to pick up three Republican Senate seats to hold 50 Senate seats, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris wielding the tie-breaking vote.

Biden has surpassed the 270 Electoral College votes needed to defeat Republican incumbent President Donald Trump.

Democrats won Republican seats in Arizona and Colorado in last week’s election. But they lost a seat in Alabama, reducing their gain to a single seat.

In Georgia, Republican Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler face challenges from Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, respectively.

(Reporting by Mohammad Zargham and Susan Heavey; Editing by Mike Collett-White)

Wide-bodied 747 crowned Alaska’s fattest bear

By Yereth Rosen

ANCHORAGE (Reuters) – In Alaska’s annual battle of heavyweights, a salmon-chomping bruin named 747 – like the jetliner – has emerged as the most fabulously fat.

The bear, one of more than 2,200 brown bears roaming Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve, was victorious on Tuesday after a week of frenzied online voting in what has become an international sensation: Fat Bear Week.

Winner 747 was a worthy champion, the park said in a statement. “This year he really packed on the pounds, looking like he was fat enough to hibernate in July and yet continuing to eat until his belly seemed to drag along the ground by late September,” the park said.

Fat Bear Week pits 12 bears against each other in playoff-style brackets. Bear fans compared photos and voted online for their favorites from last Wednesday to Tuesday night.

For humans, Fat Bear Week is a fun way to learn, from a distance, about nature and Alaska.

Katmai’s bears can grow to well over 1,000 pounds (453 kg) from summer feasting. They can also lose a third of their body weight during hibernation. That makes Fat Bear Week about “survival of the fattest,” as the Park Service puts it.

Katmai, a 4 million-acre park sprawling over mountains, lakes, streams and coastline, is famous for having the world’s densest population of brown bears, the coastal version of grizzlies.

Within Katmai, the Brooks River is a prime place for brown bears to feast. There, bears congregate in summer and fall to snatch salmon swimming upstream to spawning grounds, with much of the action captured by a webcam operated by explore.org, one of the Fat Bear Week partners.

This year, the river was more of a bear paradise than usual, thanks to a record salmon run, said Naomi Doak, a media ranger at Katmai.

What was scarce along the Brooks River was people. Peak summer normally sees about 500 visitors a day but with the coronavirus pandemic, that was down to 50 to 100, she said.

“The combination of the big salmon run and fewer people, this has really handed the river to the bears,” she said.

(Reporting by Yereth Rosen; Editing by Bill Tarrant, Robert Birsel)

Trump says he will approve permit for Canada to Alaska railway to free landlocked oil

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter over the weekend he would issue a permit for a railway project from Canada’s oil sands to ports in Alaska, a project that has many regulatory hurdles but could help spur shipments of the landlocked crude to foreign markets and U.S. refiners.

“It is my honor to inform you that I will be issuing a Presidential Permit for the A2A Cross-Border rail,” Trump wrote on Twitter. He said his decision was based on the recommendation of fellow Republicans Dan Sullivan, a U.S. senator, and Don Young, a U.S. representative. Projects that cross the U.S. border require presidential permits.

The $17 billion Alaska-Alberta Railway Development Corporation (A2A Rail) project, first proposed in 2015 by Canadian infrastructure financier Sean McCoshen, would move crude from the Alberta oil sands 1,600 miles (2,570 km) to the Alaskan coast, as well as freight in the other direction.

Much of the case for the project has been often-congested pipelines responsible for moving Alberta crude to U.S refineries. However, new pipelines are under construction, reducing the urgency for another transportation option, and European producer BP Plc recently questioned whether global oil demand has already peaked.

Once a permit is issued, A2A would require numerous regulatory clearances in the United States and Canada that would likely take years. The company could not immediately be reached.

Shipping oil by rail has caused several high-profile accidents in both Canada and the United States in recent years, leading to criticism about the practice by some environmental groups.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on how soon Trump would issue the permit.

The office of Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Canadian energy companies have complained that Canada’s regulatory system is too sluggish, and proposed oil pipelines have run into opposition from environmental and indigenous groups in both Canada and the United States.

Trump issued a permit and an executive order in attempts to speed TC Energy Corp’s Keystone XL pipeline project to bring oil sands crude to U.S. refiners, but it has been mired in delays.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner in Washington and Rod Nickel in Winnipeg; Editing by Matthew Lewis)

Mercury released by permafrost thaw puts Yukon River fish at risk: study

By Yereth Rosen

ANCHORAGE (Reuters) – If carbon emissions continue at current rates, so much mercury will leach from thawing permafrost that fish in the Yukon River could become dangerous to eat within a few decades, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications.

Current emissions rates threaten to trigger enough thaw release to drive mercury levels in Yukon River fish above federal safety guidelines by 2050, according to the study.

Mercury concentration in the Yukon is expected to double by the end of the century if carbon emissions continue at present rates, according to the study.

But if emissions are reduced in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement, mercury concentrations will increase by only 14% by the end of the century, keeping levels in fish at or below safety guidelines, according to the study.

“A lot will depend on what we do in terms of response to climate change,” said Kevin Schaefer of the Colorado-based National Snow and Ice Data Center, the study’s lead author.

The study has implications beyond the indigenous communities in Alaska and Canada that depend on Yukon River fish for their income, diets and culture, Schaefer said.

The nearly 2,000-mile river is “a bellwether or a canary-in-the-coal mine kind of thing, an indicator of what might happen over the whole Arctic,” he said. Thaw-released mercury will work its way from the land to the river and ultimately, into the oceans, and thaw-released mercury in gaseous form will encircle the world, he said.

“What happens in the Yukon is going to affect the entire globe, not just the people who live on or around the Yukon River,” he said.

A 2018 study co-authored by Schaefer, in collaboration with partners from the U.S. Geological Survey and other institutions, estimated that Northern Hemisphere’s permafrost soils hold nearly twice as much stored mercury as is in all the rest of the world’s soils, the oceans and the atmosphere combined.

(Reporting by Yereth Rosen; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Christopher Cushing)