Itâs good to hear that the Inter-Island Ferry Authority will be able to once again assist the Alaska Marine Highway System with service between Ketchikan and Metlakatla later this month while the AMHS vessel that usually serves the route is undergoing maintenence.
An IFA vessel will be sailing one roundtrip between Ketchikan and Metlakatla each day on Jan. 14, Jan. 15, Jan. 21 and Jan. 22, according to an IFA announcement.
Weâre accustomed to seeing the AMHS ferry Lituya on the route, and weâre pleased that AMHS has continued to provide service on this important link five days a week.
Yet every vessel needs regular maintenence. Weâre pleased that the Ketchikan Shipyard operated by Vigor Alaska stands ready to provide maintenence services for the Lituya and other AMHS ferries, which also means that the ferries donât have to spend a lot of extra time in transit to shipyards elsewhere.
In a normal year, the big topic of conversation would have been the heavy summer rainfall or the December deluge that threatened to cause Ketchikan Lakes Dam to breach. Or it might have been the month-long visit of Phoenix the humpback whale who bubble fed just about every day for four weeks in November at the downtown Ketchikan docks.
But in Ketchikan, in 2020, the biggest news was the same as it was all over the world, the COVID-19 Pandemic and how it changed nearly every facet of our lives over the last nine months of the year.
COVID-19 arrived in March in the First City, and, by the end of the year, more than 250 residents and travelers had tested positive. One local woman, Julie Wasuli of Saxman, died from COVID-19 in December at a hospital in Bellingham, Washington.
2020: Pandemic, natural disaster and upheaval
December 24, 2020
Megan Whitermore celebrates graduation from the back of a truck on Main Street during Tuesday s parade. The ceremony was altered due to COVID-19 restrictions.
As I sat down to write the 2020 Year in Review, I thought: I don t want to relive this year, nor should anyone else. But tradition dictates an annual recap, which if left unwritten, would end my positive relationship with CVN bookkeeper Jane Pascoe. Plus, the newspaper is a weekly black hole of white space that must be filled. So here it goes:
A January 2020 blizzard that brought 50 inches of snow in two days prompted then-borough manager Debra Schnabel to declare a public safety emergency. She told the CVN she hoped the public would hunker down while public works crews cleared roads. The term would soon reappear in a different context two months after the severe weather event that, in hindsight, seems miniscule.
Wed, 12/23/2020 - 9:08am
Gov. Mike Dunleavy prioritized injecting money into a battered economy over solving the state’s ever-worsening structural fiscal problems in his 2022 fiscal year budget but that doesn’t mean he didn’t attempt to save the state some money.
The administration wants to split nearly $50 million in unrestricted CARES Act funds into $35 million towards the state’s annual Medicaid payment and $14.6 million for general Department of Transportation funding as well as utilize $101 million of Alaska Housing Finance Corp.’s bonding authority for capital projects as ways to cover some of the 2022 budget deficit pegged at approximately $2.4 billion by the Legislative Finance Division.