Tok has no way to warn its residents, and a state coordinator says it cost houses

Tok has no townwide alarm or unified system to warn residents when an emergency is underway, a state wildfire planning coordinator told a community meeting Tuesday. She said the gap cost houses in the Mukluk Fire.

"We don't have a system in this town that tells the people there's an emergency," said Emily Yorkstorf, Community Wildfire Protection Plan project coordinator for the State of Alaska Division of Forestry, at the Tok Dog Mushers Association Hall. With one, she said, everybody would have been evacuated more easily and fewer houses would have burned.

She was answering a resident who said he had spoken with five people who did not know a fire was burning in town until 1 pm. He said he worked until 1 am the night before, pulling people from their houses. He lost his own home last year. A fire management officer for Tok and Delta said the fire had already grown to 25 acres by the time he drove over from his station.

Another resident said she and her husband live inside the evacuation area and never received a GO notification on their phones, only a single message covering Moose Horn to Mackenzie. An emergency management official apologized for what he called limitations of the technology, saying the federal wireless alert program cannot send a GO message to one polygon and a SET message to another at the same time.

Officials said the response remained in initial attack, and that door-to-door notification and a Smart911 sign-up supplement the wireless alerts. They said state emergency managers have agreed to use the same Ready, Set and Go colors and language statewide, so the framework is consistent no matter where a resident lives.

Yorkstorf said the fire shows the town needs both a disaster relief committee and a way for people to communicate with each other, and that an emergency evacuation plan belongs in the Community Wildfire Protection Plan now being rewritten for the Tok response area. That plan is the vehicle for future implementation funding, and more public meetings on it are scheduled.

Alaska Power & Telephone told the same meeting why the lights keep going out. The utility cut electricity Tuesday morning from its Tok power plant out to Dot Lake, killing the West Feeder line as wind uprooted trees along the right-of-way.

That stretch is the utility's biggest fire risk, said James Nelson, power operations manager for AP&T's Interior division. Pine cone loads have made treetops heavy over the past two weeks, and wind is pulling roots out of the ground. Power would return to as many West Feeder customers as possible within 30 to 45 minutes, and only while the wind stayed down. "As the wind comes up, more power is going to go off," Nelson said.

North-side sections stay dead because lines are down, including stretches where dozers have gone through them. Six linemen were inbound from Skagway, Haines and Prince of Wales, Golden Valley Electric was on standby, and material was coming from Anchorage, though little can be installed until the fire leaves the grid.

AP&T avoids summer right-of-way clearing because mulching equipment throws sparks. The utility has had lineman positions open for three years. And 90 percent of the time, Nelson said, it cannot get landowner permission to cut beyond its allotted right-of-way. It can legally cut a tree without the state's permission only when the tree is imminently coming into the line.

The Division of Forestry and Fire Protection put the Mukluk Fire at 5,077 acres and 16 percent contained on Aug. 19, with 167 personnel assigned. It reduced the Level 3 GO zone that day and added Ready and Set polygons around town.