A polar bear has sown panic in a remote Alaskan town on Tuesday, killing two people, according to state police.
At 2:30 p.m. (10:30 p.m. in mainland Spain), the Alaska State Police received a report of a polar bear attack in the town of Wales, at the western end of the Seward Peninsula, on the shores of the Bering Strait, that separates the United States from Russia.
As reported by the Alaska Department of Public Safety, initial reports were that "a polar bear had entered the community and had chased several residents."
The bear fatally attacked an adult woman and a young man, whose age and identity have not yet been released.
A local resident shot and killed the bear as it attacked the couple, always according to official information.
"The police and the Alaska Department of Game and Fish are working to move to Wales when weather conditions allow," adds the statement made public by the authorities.
Wales is the westernmost town on the American continent.
It has barely 150 inhabitants, mostly Inupiaq natives, it has no nearby towns and is poorly communicated.
Deadly polar bear attacks are extremely rare in Alaska, according to the
Anchorage Daily News.
In 1990, a man was killed by a polar bear in the North Slope town of Point Lay.
Biologists later said the animal was showing signs of starvation.
In 1993, a polar bear burst through a window of an Air Force radar station on the North Slope, severely maiming a 55-year-old mechanic who survived the attack.
Polar bears are about the size of large brown bears, according to the Alaska Department of Fisheries.
The largest males can weigh over 1,700 pounds (770 kilos), but the average is 600-1,200 pounds (272-544 kilos) and 2.4-3 meters in length.
Adult females weigh between 180 and 320 kilos.
A report published in 2017 by The Wildlife Society (nature protection society) described recorded attacks by polar bears as “extremely rare”.
Between 1870 and 2014, researchers documented in a database 73 attacks by wild polar bears, distributed among polar bear ranges (Canada, Greenland, Norway, Russia, and the United States), causing 20 deaths and 63 human injuries. .
“Adult male polar bears with nutritional stress were found to be the most likely to pose a threat to human safety.
Attacks by adult females were rare and most were attributed to defending the cubs," the study's conclusions indicated.
The report notes that bears acted as predators in most of the attacks, and that almost all attacks involved a maximum of two people.
“Increased concern for the safety of both humans and bears is warranted in light of predictions of increased numbers of nutritionally stressed bears spending more time on land near people due to habitat loss from sea ice," he added.
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