1st Reported By Alaska Public Media: Chris Pallister steps out of the helicopter, on to the snow covered inner shore of Montague Island. It’s a brilliant sunny day in early March and Pallister, who is President of Gulf of Alaska Keeper, is visiting Montague to get a handle on how much new debris washed up on the Island over the winter. He also needs to check on debris his crew collected into heavy duty bags called super sacks last summer. Pallister wants to make sure they held up over the punishing winter months:
“I guess it’s alright. I don’t see any damage here or anything.”
He rummages through a bag perched on the edge of a huge mound of super sacks. The bag is open on top, but otherwise looks ok:
Pallister measures debris not by the pound, but by the ton. And on outer Montague Island, he estimates there is 20 to 30 tons of debris per mile. He guesses about half of it (by volume) is from the tsunami and half is the usual marine trash that has been washing up in increasing amounts for decades. Last summer, he used funding from the legislature and other sources to begin cleaning the first three miles of the island’s coast.
“There’s another almost 70 miles to do on this shoreline and we spent close to 60 days cleaning these few miles that we did here, so this is a huge, huge problem. This island is really bad.”
The state identified Montague as one of nine priority areas for tsunami debris clean up. There are other hotspots from the southern tip of Southeast to as far west as the islands off of Kodiak. Japan gave the United States five million dollars for cleaning up debris in all the west coast states. So far, Alaska has received the biggest chunk of that money, $1 million. Elaine Busse Floyd is a director at the Department of Environmental Conservation. She thinks the state will be able to make the case for additional funding than other coastal states:
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