A few Alaska links

[sholio]

This article in the Alaska Dispatch News on Attu Island (site of the only WWII fighting on American soil) is worth it for the slideshow of the island's fascinating post-apocalyptic wilderness. Well, I guess some people's "fascinating post-apocalyptic" is someone else's "appalling environmental horrors", but I thought it was interesting to see what 70 years of Aleutian weather looks like on buildings, fuel tanks, and other war debris, with its own kind of weird, terrible beauty.

In other Alaska-related linkage, I recently fell down the nostalgia pit at this site: Growing up in Anchorage. A lot of the posts on the site are before my time, since I was born in the '70s, but the part of the site that really sent me down the nostalgia hole was the memories of the owner/founder of Chilkoot Charlie's, a notorious bar in a notorious part of Anchorage where I lived, at various times, off and on through the '80s and early '90s.

My childhood was largely spent in Bush Alaska in a cabin off the road system, but my parents were separated and my dad lived in Anchorage, invariably in the worst parts of Anchorage since he could never afford rent and was perpetually getting evicted from various apartments and trailers; so I spent quite a bit of time there, especially after I started having chronic health problems when I was around 8 or 9 and therefore needed to be in town a lot. A number of those apartments were in Spenard, an Anchorage neighborhood which had cheap rent because it was, well, terrible.

... or at least very unique. It's gentrified somewhat over the last couple of decades, but when I was there, it was full of low-rent motels, biker bars, strip clubs, and X-rated bookstores, as well as a lot of strip malls with more normal sorts of business, such as Anchorage's only comic store (a favorite haunt of mine as a kid) and Blaine's, the local art supply store. At one time we lived just a couple of blocks from Chilkoot Charlie's, just behind its famous windmill. The comic store was across the street and I used to walk past the bar to get there.

A few select posts from the Chilkoot Charlie's guy: trying not to get murdered by bikers (the bit about the guy with the shotgun on the roof, good lord); Anchorage's second gay bar (burned down by the owner of Anchorage's first gay bar); a somewhat less censored version of the windmill story linked at the ADN site above (and now I know why there used to be a two-headed pig on the old Chilkoot Charlie's sign; somehow people never seem to talk about these things with 10-year-olds).

... Anchorage in the '80s, man. I think it was just in the last few years that I realized how different the '80s were in Alaska than everywhere else in the country. The 1980s in most of the U.S.: hair bands, bubblegum pop, and multicolored leg warmers. The 1980s in Alaska: recession, concrete architecture, unemployment, and strippers.

Comments

[ratcreature]

War detritus sucks. Though at least those don't seem to lie under people. Like the unexploded bombs with slowly rotting detonators buried in every carpet bombed area. Seriously nasty are the ones with failed chemical delayed detonation. Those are kind of horrible even if they worked as intended because they were designed to kill rescue personell by exploding some thirty minutes to a few hours after the main bombs, but they are harder to disarm if they failed completely and only getting worse as the detonator parts rot. Potentially they become spontaneously exploding too.

And small war debris is no better. Every now and then children here still find old grenades and stuff just playing in city parks, not never cleared battlefields. Just things still surfacing after they were hidden in some river bank or mudhole.

And it's lucky if they only dumped oil or fuel in rotting barrels. In the Baltic sea they dumped chemical weapons including white phosphorus to dispose of them after the war and that is on top of the phosphorus used in bombs, and as the containers rot clumps of it get washed ashore. It looks like amber, only once it dries out it will still do what phosphorus does snd ignite itself. So people who put it in their pocket will get burned as their clothing ignites. It injures a couple of people, in particular children, every year, even though there are warning signs at the worst affected beaches and tourism boards clean beaches. Explosives remnants also get washed ashore and look like interesting flotsam, only those usually don't ignite unprovoked.

[sholio]

*nods* :(

I know we're very lucky that here, we don't have war debris in inhabited areas. It must be terrible to deal with.

[ratcreature]

You just have to deal with it for so much longer than the war lasted, even if eventually you recover enough to have resources and such. Like with more recent war detritus they feared that the Syrian refugees coming across the Balkans might walk into minefields, because of course those countries were all at war in the 90s and had mined their borders and haven't gotten around to clearing everything.

Here it only ever makes the main news if they have to evacuate many thousands because a bomb is too fragile to move before disarming and big enough that the damage would affect the surrounding houses, but minor bomb disposals don't even rate notice. I mean mostly they are found by chance through construction work, because systematic clearing is too expensive. Some years back the allies eventually shared their post-bombing aerial photographs after those got declassified, and there you can spot the small impacts from unexploded bombs, but I guess systematic clearing is just too expensive. Even in prominent places, like for example there is a big field in my city that is used for popular giant carnivals and such (it used to be where a cathedral stood until 18-something). On that field also stands a giant WWII bunker, that also was used as a main air defense station, so that field was heavily bombed. They suspect there to be still some underneath, like in 2012 a water main needed repair and they found two while digging, and some five thousand people from the surrounding areas had to be evacuated, but they never systematically cleared the rest of the area, even though it is mostly an empty parking lot that three times a year is used for huge carnivals. The authorities just issued an "absolutes Grabungsverbot" (absolute prohibition against digging), so the carnies aren't allowed to ram in pegs into the ground for tents or such, but consider the explosives not dangerous as long as the ground isn't disturbed.

I suppose it is a sort of willful blindness aided by the fact that afaik there haven't been any deaths by spontaneously explosions from rotting bombs, just accidental deaths of construction workers and bomb disposal technicians. But most experts you see in the news say that it is risk getting worse the longer they are in the ground. And even without extra effort they still find about five thousand bombs in Germany every year, in my city alone around twenty bigger ones every year, but most only get a brief line in the local news, or I notice because they interrupted some metro line or closed main streets or bridges for traffic due to the disposal.

[brightknightie]

>"such as Anchorage's only comic store"

So many memories of Bosco's... some of them even dating back to the older, smaller, sunnier location, because I was also born in the '70s, but I think several years before you. :-)

[sholio]

I didn't know it used to be in a different location! Where was it? (Yeah, the current location is the only one I remember.)

They just recently moved again, a few blocks up the street. I haven't been to their new location yet, but it's very weird to drive past and see the old building vacant.