First day in my new job with the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services, Division of Public Health. I am excited about this new position which corresponds to what I have been wanting to do for years. I simply thought there would never be an actual job out there corresponding to what I really wanted to do. Never say never! This job seemed like it was especially designed for me. That made it a tiny bit easier to "step that step" and make the decision to leave the DC area.
So there we go! Time to go to the office! Apparently, there is "no dress code"!? Wow! That is a change! But let us not push it and show up in jeans on day 1.
Right away, I sense a relaxed and healthy atmosphere. Ali who hired me and with whom I have been talking on the phone quite a bit comes and greets me. He introduces me to a few colleagues and everybody is very welcoming and smiley. The office space seems a bit crammed and I am thinking about my nice window office in DC. It is very unlikely I will get such a nice space here... We walk around the office and suddenly: "This is your office" says Ali pointing at a space with too much furniture, a big pillar in a corner, an even bigger window and one heck of a view on the Chugach mountains!! Wow! I want to stick my nose at the window and just look outside for a while. But no time for that... a huge pile of new hire paperwork is waiting for me.
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| View from my new office |
Immediately after the administrative formalities are taken care of (or most of them), I get a feel of what the job is going to be like. First, we receive a phone call from someone suspecting their kid's seizures were due to asphalt vapor exposure. Then we go to a meeting at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium where many health issues are discussed with different public health professionals. The following day, I will also attend various meeting where acronyms of all sorts fly back and forth, making me feel like everybody is speaking a foreign language.
Tyonek and the Kenai peninsula are on fire!
Another public health issue is due to some wildfires that started on Monday in the Tyonek area located West of Anchorage on the Cook Inlet, as well as the Kenai peninsula. On Wednesday, my colleague Ali gave a TV interview to provide recommendations to the public about how to handle potential adverse effects caused by the smoke but nothing was really obvious in Anchorage. On Thursday morning, I woke up wondering if my hotel was on fire. The skies seemed overcast, the mountains were barely visible and the air was hardly breathable. At the office, the fires were and are the hot topic. Everybody is working on press releases, website updates and various communications to minimize the population exposure. witnessing the crisis management from the inside is quite interesting.
These fires could not be contained right away because of the thick smoke and they expanded extremely fast. In Tyonek, they grew from 1,000 acres on Monday to 20,000 by Tuesday night and almost 45,000 acres on Wednesday. Wildfires were the last thing I was expecting in Alaska! But I hear they happen often and can be quite devastating.
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