By Alex deMarban
Anchorage Daily News (Alaska)
Copyright 2006 Anchorage Daily News
All Rights Reserved
Kids playing with matches started a fire that destroyed at least $30 million in property and left more than 70 people homeless in the Southwest Alaska village of Hooper Bay, fire investigators said Monday.
The kids, younger than 12, crawled late at night through gaps in the wooden skirting around the base of the village’s old school — built on pilings — where they lit grass and trash fires, said Alaska State Trooper spokesman Greg Wilkinson.
The early-morning fire Aug. 3 flattened a school complex that included teacher housing. Also charred were a grocery store, 14 homes and other structures, and about 14 acres in the Yup’ik village of 1,100. No one was seriously injured, but displaced families lost almost everything. About 400 students attended the school.
Wilkinson would not release the names, ages or gender of the children who were playing with matches or say how many were involved.
Nor were their identities widely known in the village Monday, residents said. Martha Simon, who lost her home in the blaze, said she didn’t know.
“If they’re young kids, I can forgive them because people tell us everything we lost is replaceable,” said Simon, reached by phone at her mother-in-law’s house, where she is staying.
“I just feel compassion for these kids, even if our homes and school burned,” she said, her voice breaking. “I just hope they learned that this was very wrong.”
Simon, her husband and seven children had lived in their house, she said. Now they’re staying with family members at different homes in the village. One grandson was sent to Kotlik, 132 miles north, to stay with relatives.
She hopes to reunite everyone in the nearby village of Scammon Bay in an old two-story family home. Her children will attend school in that village.
The kids apparently did not mean to destroy the school, investigators said.
“I don’t think they intentionally were trying to do what happened,” Hooper Bay Police Chief James Hoelscher said. “They were playing with matches, and from my understanding they were intrigued by fire and what it does. And you know, it got out of hand, it got to a point where they never would have thought it would.”
Alaska State Troopers conducted the investigation into the cause of the fire with the state fire marshal’s office, and with help from Hooper Bay police.
A final report will be forwarded to state juvenile authorities in two weeks, Wilkinson said. Officials with the Division of Juvenile Justice may take action against the children, such as calling them before a judge, he said.
The kids could also face village justice, said Eric Olson Sr., tribal council chief.
The village’s tribal court helps find new homes for children in troubled families, he said. But the fire was so devastating, he said, the judges may be interested in reviewing this case to consider punishment.
Tribal courts in Alaska operate at the village level. They often consist of village elders and dole out fines or community service for such things as disorderly conduct and minor juvenile offenses.
Hooper Bay tribal judges could not be reached Monday. Many are out on the tundra picking salmonberries for the winter, Olson said.
ONE-THIRD IN SCHOOL
In the Yup’ik community, like many other Alaska villages, families are generally large. More than one-third of the village population attended the school, with classes scheduled to start Aug. 24.
This school year is on hold until the new school, which was under construction before the fire, is finished. School authorities are trying to speed construction at that school — scheduled to open in December — to get kids in classrooms sooner, Olson said.
Most Hooper Bay youth crime is petty, Hoelscher said.
“I seriously hope if the tribe isn’t going to do anything, (that) the parents discipline these kids so they know that that type of behavior won’t be tolerated,” he said.
The state is shipping modular homes and construction trailers to the village to temporarily house displaced families, many of whom had no insurance, officials said.
Most of the homeless have remained in the village, staying with families and friends.