10 Years Ago
The Haines Borough School Board will meet at 7 p.m. on July 14 to hear a detailed presentation and ask questions about a proposal by borough consultant Darsie Culbeck to use wood chips to heat public buildings.
In a brief presentation to the board Tuesday, Culbeck said chip-burning boilers near the swimming pool could save the school district up to $2 million over the next 20 years, at current fuel prices.
Culbeck told the board the reason he wants to proceed with chips – instead of wood pellets, as previously planned – was that chips could be locally produced. “We can’t make pellets in the community right now, but we can make chips.”
Previous to a borough decision to pursue pellet heat, borough leaders passed over chips as an option. Arguments against chips included that they required handling before burning, including drying, and that they tended to ball together, creating “clinkers” that gummed up chip delivery systems.
Culbeck told the board that quarter-inch “microchips” would be dried one year, leaving them with the “right moisture content” for boilers the borough recently acquired.
Chips previously considered – including ones used at a municipal facility in Craig – were “messy” and “hard to work with,” Culbeck said.
Culbeck said he envisioned the Haines Borough would employ a worker to tend the chip boiler. “There’s more maintenance needed on a chip boiler than an oil boiler. That’s something we do recognize,” he said.
20 Years Ago
Musicians from around the world will be coming to Haines in August to participate in the first annual CrossSound Institute summer session.
The five-day course, which will include master classes open to Haines residents, is aimed at honing the skills of singers and piano accompanists, and will be capped by a public concert featuring original works by two visiting composers.
Stewart Emerson, a professor at Berlin’s Hanns Eisler Academy of music, will headline the sessions, offering expertise that has helped train some of Europe;’s most acclaimed operatic singers. “He’s a real specialist in his field,” said Juneau contractor Stefan Hakenberg, who worked with Emerson at Germany’s Cologne Opera in the early 1990s. “A lot of today’s opera singers in big opera houses have worked with him.”
Emerson has taught at the Royal College of Music in London and is an expert in four fields: conducting, singing, piano and vocal coaching, said Nancy Nash, program director for the Haines sessions.
60 Years Ago
Haines area lumber operators are expanding their activities westward.
Most recent announcement from the office of Governor Hickel reports that Westward Timber Products, a group formed by John Schnabel of Schnabel Lumber Co. in Haines and James and Gifford Evens, owners of Evans Lumber Co. in Anchorage, will open a mill in Seward to process timber from the Fairbanks area.
Present plans call for moving a stable mill from Haines to the Seward site, which will employ 15 mill workers plus woods personnel.
Future plans are for a mill capable of 200,000 board feet of cants a day plus an annual output of 192,000 tons of wood chips per year.
Mill construction and operation will hinge on successful completion of timber sale arrangements. The operation will employ some 70 workers in the mill and 75 in the field, according to the governor’s office.