Cleaning up tsunami debris: Alaskan coastal communities watch what washes ashore.

AuthorLochner, Mary
PositionSPECIAL SECTION: Environmental Services

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In Yakutat, a small Southeast Alaska community where beach walking is a favorite local past time, the unusual gifts brought on the cold January current in 2012 did not take long to arouse interest and attention from the town's inhabitants.

Those who had seen the large pieces of Styrofoam washing up on shore asked their friends and neighbors if they'd been down to the beach, drawing more people to the spectacle. Every day the ocean's waves unloaded new revelations on Yakutat's shores, of what had been carried unseen on its currents since the March 11 tsunami raked whole towns from Japan's northeastern coastlines the year before.

Mostly it was Styrofoam, Yakutat Tlingit Tribe President Victoria Demmert says--but they'd also see 50-gallon drums, and plastic bottles with Japanese writing on them. Sometimes, someone would reach down to the sandy shore and retrieve a shoe from its place of rest.

According to Demmert, everyone picked up as they could, and said prayers for the people whose lives these ocean-borne messengers of tragedy had once been a part of.

Despite assurances from authorities that it was too early for tsunami debris to be hitting Alaska's shores, Demmert says locals knew right away what the debris was when it started arriving this past January.

"We know what normally comes up on our beach," she says. "This was unusual--and a lot of it. You could fill up your truck and within half an hour, you'd have your truck filled up with debris."

The Gates of Prince William Sound

Currents and winds have carried--and continue to carry--tsunami debris toward the northwest coast of the contiguous United States. From there it sweeps south and north, with the north-traveling debris pushing up along the Alaska panhandle until it curls northwest across the Gulf of Alaska, depositing the bulk of debris along the outer coasts. At the entry to Prince William Sound, the massive Montague and Hinchinbrook islands lie diagonally in a southwest-to-northeast direction, standing guard and acting, along with smaller islands, as a gate protecting the sound from the majority of the debris. Their geography has made these islands the long-time collectors of thick tangles of driftwood, and more recently, of the bits of plastic that for decades have accumulated in the Pacific Ocean and been redistributed on Pacific shores.

While many parts of Alaska's Gulf Coast remain untouched or little impacted by the tsunami debris, places like Montague...

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