20 years ago

If you poke around the tide pools off Munson Point on a minus tide, you might stumble across an old engine block 200 feet out from the shoreline near the mouth of Beluga Slough near Bishop’s Beach. Old-timers say years ago that engine got there when someone dumped it off the end of the bluff — where the bluff used to be a half-century ago. You don’t need to slog around in Xtra-Tufs to see how Homer’s coastline has changed. This week, Kachemak Bay Research Reserve delivered to the city of Homer a draft report of “Homer Coastal Changes,” an analysis of aerial photographs from 1951 to 2003 showing how the coast has eroded over the past 52 years.

— From the issue of

Nov. 18, 2004

30 years ago

Homer Electric Association contractors have dug up 3,000 cubic yards of benzene-contaminated dirt around the cooperative’s Lake Street warehouse and are setting up systems to treat that dirt, as well as the ground beneath the warehouse and surrounding groundwater, cooperative officials say. Company officials first discovered the contamination in September 1990 when they dug up the tanks — two 2,000-gallon diesel tanks and one 4,000-gallon gasoline tank — that had been buried eight years.

— From the issue of

Nov. 17, 1994