Foster mothers Gabi Flaten and Stephanie Weitman wanted to organize an event that would help the community’s foster and adopted children not feel so frightened and alone.
They came up with “Shedding Light,” a sky lantern release event initially scheduled for mid-January. Children and youth were invited to “come and release fear and pain from 2016 and shed light on your hopes for the New Year. Stand alongside your foster and/or adoptive family and we will light up the night sky,” read the Facebook invitation.
“We thought it would be a neat idea, a creative, powerful symbol,” Flaten said.
But a recent outright ban statewide on sky lanterns has forced the organizers to have to re-think the Shedding Light event, which was postponed to June 30 because of bad weather.
On Thursday, Capital City Fire/Rescue posted the following notice on its Facebook page: “As of the state’s adoption of the new fire code this month, sky lanterns are prohibited from being released in Alaska. Several groups in Juneau in recent years have had organized releases of sky lanterns in honor someone or a social cause. By state regulation, this practice is no longer legal.”
CCFR Fire Chief Rich Etheridge explained that the change was posted to Facebook because the fire department occasionally gets questions on releasing the lanterns.
”I just want to clarify this was not a local code change, it was done at a state level,” he wrote in an email to the Empire.
‘People are concerned and rightfully so’
Chinese lanterns, or sky lanterns, are a popular Juneau tradition, with residents frequently lighting the small paper lanterns and casting them aloft at the Winter Solstice and to commemorate life events.
In October, for example, the Thunder Mountain High School boys football team lit dozens of Chinese lanterns after the game in honor of Falcons senior Ryan Mayhew, who died in an accidental shooting just a few weeks earlier.
The statewide ban, which went into effect on May 19, is part of some language that was added when Alaska adopted the 2012 International Fire Code, explained state Life Safety Inspection Bureau Supervisor Jeff Morton.
According to Morton, the state had lagged behind adopting more current fire codes and, until this spring, was still using the 2009 code.
In that 2009 code, sky lanterns, which are considered aerial flame devices, could be used with prior approval by a fire department or whoever had jurisdiction, Morton said. They were mostly banned already by jurisdictions that set their own regulations, such as Fairbanks and Anchorage.
“They wanted nothing to do with them, for obvious reasons,” Morton said. “It’s like lighting a paper airplane and throwing it into the wind. Now imagine 150 of those lit and traveling uncontrolled. You can imagine the consequences. … There’s just no safe way to deploy those things.”
In 2014, an event in Anchorage that included the launching of paper lanterns in support of victims of domestic violence led officials at Merrill Field to briefly reroute airplane traffic when the lanterns appeared in the flight path, with police receiving calls about rerouted planes and a lantern landing on a vehicle going about 70 mph that almost crashed, according to news reports.
Last year in Colorado, a lantern festival led to serious concerns after the flaming lanterns blew five miles from their launching point and landed on a farmer’s 40-acre parcel.
“We were watching it not really knowing what it was, but liking it. It was beautiful,” Lauren Gueswel told a Denver TV station.
She said the view was stunning, until close to 200 lanterns landed on her farmland. Gueswel and her husband chased after the debris while also trying to calm spooked animals.
“Terrified. They were absolutely terrified,” Gueswel said. “I was extremely concerned.”
Similarly, a Lantern Fest in 2016 at the state fair in Palmer — which Morton said proceeded despite having been denied permission — ended with lanterns landing on taxiways and near aircraft at the airport, which he called “just another example of how this doesn’t pan out very well.”
The state fire code now actually defines sky lanterns and bans them outright.
The ban was enacted after complaints and concerns from across the state, Morton said, characterizing the issue as, “I don’t want a major fire in my backyard. … People are concerned and rightfully so.”
For her part, Flaten said she understands the concern, even though her Shedding Light event was going to use biodegradable lanterns that were being launched over the water.
“We will go back to the drawing board and find a way to make this work,” she said Thursday after reading CCFR’s Facebook post. “It’s definitely a huge blow. I’m disappointed — but luckily we have a little bit of time to salvage the situation.”
• Contact reporter Liz Kellar at 523-2246 or liz.kellar@juneauempire,com.
