Interior

Army officials have identified the three soldiers who died Thursday after the two helicopters they were flying collided in mid-air near Healy.

The victims are 39-year-old Chief Warrant Officer 3 Christopher Eramo of Oneonta, New York; 28-year-old Chief Warrant Officer 2 Kyle McKenna of Colorado Springs, Colorado; and 32-year-old Chief Warrant Officer Stewart Wayment of North Logan, Utah.

A fourth soldier who was injured in the crash and transported to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital is still undergoing treatment there. A news release issued Saturday by the 11th Airborne Division says the servicemember was in stable condition. Army officials haven’t yet released the soldier’s name.

11th Airborne spokesperson John Pennell said the soldiers were flying two AH-64 Apache helicopters with the Fort Wainwright-based 1st Attack Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment. He said the Apaches were returning Thursday afternoon from a training mission in the Donnelly Training Area near Fort Greely when they collided and crashed about 50 miles east of Healy.

“The terrain is extremely rugged, mountainous, deep snow, heavily forested. It required helicopter access with hoists, to get in there,” he said.

Pennell said there wasn’t much information available yet about other factors that may have contributed to the collision. But he said investigators were scheduled to fly in Saturday to the crash site.

“There is a safety investigation that will be ongoing by the Army’s Combat Readiness Center out of Ft. Novosel, Alabama,” he said. “Until they have made their determination, there’s just really no way that I can give you any kind of speculation.”

The Federal Aviation Administration has restricted air traffic within 25 nautical miles of the crash site through May 4, to facilitate the investigation.

Thursday’s crash is the second this year involving 11th Airborne Apache helicopters in Alaska. In February, two soldiers with the 11th Airborne Battalion were injured when the Apache they were in crashed soon after takeoff from the Talkeetna Airport, where they’d stopped to refuel on the way back from Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson.

In March, nine soldiers were killed in Kentucky when the Blackhawk helicopter they were in crashed during a routine nighttime training exercise.

In response to the crashes, the Army on Friday grounded all its aviation units and ordered them to conduct training this week before they’d be allowed to fly again.

KUAC senior reporter/producer Dan Bross contributed to this story.

Three soldiers died and another was injured in a mid-air crash of two Army helicopters in Interior Alaska yesterday.

According to an 11^th Airborne Division release, the helicopters  — based at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks — were returning from a training mission when they collided near Healy.

The release says two soldiers were declared dead at the scene and a third died on the way to Fairbanks Memorial Hospital. The soldier injured in the crash is being treated at the hospital in Fairbanks.

The accident will be investigated by a team from the Army Combat Readiness Center, in Alabama. The Army says it will withhold the names of the victims until 24 hours after their next of kin have been notified.

In February, two soldiers were hurt after their For Wainwright-based Apache helicopter crashed in Talkeetna.

The Army has sent 90 Stryker vehicles from Fort Wainwright to Ukraine to help the nation defend itself. The fort still has a few Strykers around to help soldiers train to defend against attack with weapons of mass destruction.

The Army transferred 329 Strykers from Fort Wainwright to the Anniston Army Depot in Alabama last fall, then in January sent 90 of them to Ukraine as part of a military aid package.

“Those are the ones that have been utilized to support the Ukrainian effort,” says Ashley John, a spokesperson for the Army’s Ground Combat Systems Program Executive Office in Michigan. John said in an email Monday that the Strykers sent overseas were “part of the U.S. commitment to provide security assistance to Ukraine.”

In February, the U.S. sent about 30 Strykers to Bulgaria, a Balkan nation south of Ukraine.

11th Airborne Division commander Maj. Gen. Brian Eifler says the Stryker transfer to Ukraine was done after the Army decided last fall that the vehicles wouldn’t fit with the division’s directive to focus on defending the Arctic and training here.

“That was a decision made at the Army level, to divest of the Strykers and work on a force that’s more capable in the region and also training in that environment,” Eifler said in a news conference last month. He said the multi-wheeled, lightly armored vehicles were no longer suited for the division and its two newly reorganized brigades: a mainly infantry unit based at Fort Wainwright and an airborne unit at Joint Base Elemendorf-Richardson.

But the Army decided to keep a few specially equipped Strykers in Alaska.

“Back in September, we divested ourselves of probably 99% of the Strykers that we had here at Wainwright. However, one unit did keep a small handful of them,” says Eve Baker, a Fort Wainwright spokesperson. She was referring to the 17th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion. The unit specializes in training soldiers on how to respond to attacks involving chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons.

“So these Stryker vehicles have radiation-detection equipment and protective abilities, and they’re used Armywide in this type of unit,” she said in an interview last week

Baker says some of those Strykers and their crews took part in last month’s Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center, or JPMRC, training exercise held on training areas around Fort Wainwright.

“So people may see them and be confused,” she said, “but we did divest ourselves of the vast majority of the Stryker vehicles.”

Meanwhile, Army officials are trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the Strykers.

“The Army is still considering several options on what they intend to do with the particular Strykers that came out of Alaska,” says Gen.Charles Flynn, who heads up the Army’s Pacific Command. Both he and Eifler talked about Strykers and the JPMRC exercise during a March 30 news conference at Fort Wainwright.

“Obviously they need to be upgraded,” Flynn said, “but there’s a wide range of options that the Headquarters Department of the Army is working their way through.”

Army officials say the Stryker is a versatile platform that supports 18 variations that include vehicles equipped with armaments like mortars or cannons, and others that transport soldiers and supplies and clear minefields. Flynn said the Army is modernized some Strykers to accommodate short-range air-defense and intelligence-collection systems.

Three snowmachiners based in the Lower 48 have completed an epic backcountry journey from Minnesota to Alaska. They’re known as the 3 Old Guys: 70-year-old Rex Hibbert of Idaho and 72-year-old Paul Dick and 65-year-old Rob Hallstrom, both from Minnesota.

Hallstrom says the three friends have a done a lot of long distance snowmachine racing and riding over the decades and were looking for a new adventure.

“When you think of adventure, Alaska comes up, of course,,” Hallstrom said. “I started looking at a map and kind of connecting some old trails and lakes and rivers and talked about how we might be able to do it.”

The guys left on March 6 for the 4,500-mile trip. Hallstrom says the first thousand miles were on trails. But that changed in Flin Flon, Manitoba, where the next leg followed a long-abandoned cat track that required bushwhacking.

“Cutting down trees and willows — we had a real hard time getting through some of those stretches,” he said.

After that Hallstrom says they rode across Lake Athabasca, down the Slave River, across Great Slave Lake, down the McKenzie River to Inuvik, then on to Ft. McPherson, and through the Richardson Mountains to Old Crow.

“At Old Crow, we went down the Porcupine River,” he said. “About 330 miles of river travel where no one travels, so that was all breaking trail.”

During the five-week trip, Hallstrom says they drove over a range of surfaces.

“Broken ice, slush, rocks the size of grapefruits, deep powder snow, gravel roads,” he said.

And they got stuck a few times.

“Our record was all three snowmobiles and sleighs stuck in the slush at one time,” he said.

And they suffered a few breakdowns, including successive issues this week which forced them to end the trip a little early, along the Steese Highway.

“We didn’t actually ride into Fairbanks,” he said. “But our goal was to ride to Alaska, so we feel like that was a success.”

Hallstrom says the trip was highlighted by amazing country.

“No day was like the day before,” he said. “I mean, every turn in the river there would be something that would come up that made it fun and challenging.”

And Hallstrom said they met a lot of great people who helped them along the way.

“We would stop into a little community, and they would tell us, ‘Well, you’re going over to this building, and they got supper waiting for you. You can put your machines over here and work on your machines — this guy’s got a shop,’” Hallstrom said. “They would have everything laid our for us and do everything they could to help us. That just made the whole trip.”

A little sore and a lot thinner, Hallstrom says the 3 Old Guys are ready to head home and rest, but suspects after a few weeks they’ll start dreaming up another adventure.

The Environmental Protection Agency has fined the owner of the Pogo gold mine $600,000 for improperly storing, treating and disposing of nearly 365,000 tons of hazardous materials into the mine near Delta Junction.

The EPA said in a news release issued Tuesday that it fined Australia-based Northern Star Resources for 81 violations of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, or RCRA. The violations mainly involved hazardous wastes discovered in and around an assay laboratory at the mine.

“There’s a concern that they don’t have a good handle on the types of hazards that they were generating in that laboratory,” says Brett Dugan, an EPA attorney based at the agency’s Region 10 office in Seattle.

Dugan says the violations were discovered during a June 2019 inspection at the mine and two underground tanks beneath the lab.

“They were accumulating acidic waste in one tank underneath the laboratory, and then cyanide-bearing waste in another,” he said, “and then treating them on-site.”

Dugan says the tanks didn’t comply with federal regulations. And neither did the way Northern Star was getting rid of the hazardous materials.

“They were disposing of this waste by mixing it with all the other wastes that are generated as part of the mine, (and) they were disposing it on-site,” he said in an interview Tuesday.

Dugan says workers at Pogo got rid of waste by mixing it in with a concrete slurry and injected it into the mine. He says the process violated federal regulations and posed potential environmental concerns.

According to a Sept. 27, 2022 consent agreement between EPA and Northern Star, “between at least June 3, 2019, and May 29, 2021, Respondent (Northern Star) stored, treated, and disposed of hazardous waste at the Facility without a permit or interim status in violation” of provisions of the EPA-administered hazardous waste-permit program.

A Fairbanks-based Northern Star spokesperson said in a written response Tuesday that the company’s disposal of hazardous wastes at the mine “did not result in any negative impact on or damage to the environment.” The spokesperson added that “Northern Star has already taken steps to enhance its current training in RCRA compliance to address any gaps identified to meet RCRA requirements.”

Dugan said Northern Star has agreed to stop using the tanks and seal them. He said it also agreed to stop disposing of the waste in the mine, and instead to store it in containers and ship it to a permitted disposal facility, as the RCRA law requires.

Editor’s note: KUAC Senior Reporter/Producer Dan Bross contributed to this story.

The state Division of Forestry has cleared a wide swath of trees and vegetation from a fire-prone area west of Delta Junction. It’s one of several fuel breaks that Forestry has cleared over the past year to protect other communities around the state from wildfire.

Forestry Division crews used earthmovers and other equipment last winter, while the ground was frozen, to clear a 300-foot-wide, 13-mile-long swath of forest west of the Delta River. That’s where several big wildfires have burned in recent years, like the Oregon Lakes Fire that blackened 35-thousand acres in 2019.

“That area has a got a frequent-fire history,” says Norm McDonald, who heads up Forestry’s Fairbanks-based fire and aviation operations. “The combination of fire starts and the wind — that’s just an area of concern for us.”

McDonald says agency officials have long considered cutting a fuel break in the area, to eliminate vegetation that feeds a fire and to create safe areas for staging crews to fight wildfires. And the Oregon Lakes Fire, along with increased state and federal funding for wildfire prevention, motivated them to get the job done.

“It gives us a toe-hold,” he said, “a place where we can safely put firefighters to protect whatever values that we identified.”

That toe-hold is the 349-acre fuel break, west of the Delta River and the city of Delta Junction on state land near military training areas that are littered with unexploded bombs and other munitions.

“We know it was used actively by the military for training, and we know there’s unexploded ordnance out there,” he said, “So we have not and will not put firefighters in there.”

North of that area, there are several cabins scattered about and structures that are part of the faith-based Whitestone community, where about 60 people live. The area is vulnerable to wildfires sometimes sparked by military training that can spread quickly through dry, dense vegetation, often driven by high winds.

“Having a pre-identified or pre-established fuels break in that area just makes a lot of sense,” McDonald said in an interview Wednesday.

He said Forestry hopes to begin work on the bigger phase 2 of the Delta River-West project late next year. He says it’s part of Forestry’s “proactive approach to fire management” that’s being applied statewide.

“We’ve got projects going in Fairbanks and Kenai and Anchorage and Mat-Su Valley. So, across the state, people will notice more fuel-reduction activity than we’ve ever had.”

The Sunset Fuel Break in the Mat-Su, for example, which was completed last month, will help protect the communities of Houston, Meadow Lakes and Wasilla.

McDonald says state and federal fire officials believe fuel-reduction projects are more important now that climate change has made wildfire seasons start earlier and last longer, with larger and more destructive fires.

He says fuel breaks also offer another benefit, in the form of firewood

“We found people are excited to have a fuel break that protects their community,” he said, “but they’re also really excited to have a place to get firewood.”

McDonald says area residents can contact their local Forestry office to find out how to apply for a permit to pick up firewood left over from the projects, once they’re completed.