Mother Nature Flexes Her Muscles

The small town Eagle was hit hard by an ice jam and subsequent flooding from the Yukon River. Ice bergs backed up against fast ice in front of town and the water levels continued to jump until the jam finally broke loose. But not before the old native village of Eagle was totally destroyed and many other homes and businesses in the newer town of Eagle met the same disastrous fate.

The second story picture window of Charlie House's B&B was smashed out by this ice berg. All of Charlie's handcrafted buildings were displaced and ruined. He plans on cutting them up with a chainsaw and burning them in place.

A displaced cabin in amongst the jumble ice.

The folks that put up this memorial lost their home and all of their vehicles.

This was were first street used to be. It was totally covered in ice and had pushed all of the homes up and off of their foundations.

The Eagle school wore many hats...it acted as a homeless shelter, chow hall, supply exchange, Op's office and the meeting hall. I was very impressed by the quality of leadership in the school and the way the community hung in there.

The scope of work that I dealt with was spill response and tank recovery. Here we were extracting an over turned fuel truck tanker.

My co-worker looks on as Great Northwest contractors begin to work their way through the jumble ice on their way the the Holland-America Cruise ship.

The multimillion dollar ship was jammed into a precarious position. Holland-America is spending a ton of money to get the ship dislodged and ready for the tourist season.

Our contractors work at extracting a tank that was located out in the ice field.

I found this poem nailed to an old cabin and thought that it was fairly fitting for the current situation.