The Army’s last week released a report on its investigation into the April 27 crash of two Army Apache AH-64D helicopters like these in a mountainous area 60 miles south of Fairbanks. (Cameron Roxberry/U.S. Army)
The Army has released a report on its investigation into a mid-air helicopter crash in a remote mountainous area 60 miles south of Fort Wainwright that killed three soldiers last April.
The report released by the Army Combat Readiness Center is 385 pages long, but much of it, including details about the crash, is heavily redacted. The parts not blacked-out include findings the Army hadn’t previously disclosed, such as: the crash occurred as the two helicopters that collided and a dozen others were flying back to Fort Wainwright after a two-week training exercise.
“All 14 aircraft were AH-64Delta Apache helicopters,” says Jimmie Cummings, a spokesperson for the Alabama-based Combat Readiness Center.
Cummings couldn’t talk Thursday about redactions in the report, but clarified some of the information, like exactly where the crash happened.
“The mishap occurred 60 miles south of Ladd Army Airfield,” he said
That’s about 50 miles south of the Tanana River, near the confluence of the Wood River and Sheep Creek.
The report says the 14 Apaches took off from the Donnelly Training Area south of Fort Greely just after noon April 27th and headed west through the Alaska Range for flight to Nenana. From there, they intended to fly over Fairbanks International Airport en route to Ladd Field on Fort Wainwright.
Mid-air collision in mountain pass
The report says about 48 minutes into the flight, the formation turned right and headed north into a mountain pass. Army officials have said there were no weather advisories or visibility problems in the area.
The report says the two Apaches that crashed were traveling at about 82 mph about 250 feet above ground level. Then, 30 seconds after they executed the turn, the pilot of one of the Apaches slowed down and lost sight of the other, then tried to increase airspeed and hit the main rotor blades of the other aircraft. Both of the helicopters then crashed into the side of a mountain.
A crew member aboard one of the helicopters then transmitted a mayday call. But the report says “there were no mayday calls or radio transmissions” from the other Apache.
The three soldiers who died were assigned to the 1st Attack Battalion, 25th Aviation Regiment: 39-year-old Chief Warrant Officer 3 Christopher Eramo, of New York; 28-year-old Chief Warrant Officer 2 Kyle McKenna, of Colorado, and 32-year-old Warrant Officer 1 Stewart Wayment, of Utah.
A fourth soldier who hasn’t been identified was injured and hospitalized.
Portions of the report on lessons learned and recommendations based on them were both redacted.
The Army released the report last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by KUAC.
Jim Lanier handling his dogs at the Finger Lake checkpoint in his protective mountain biking gear. (Photo by Zachariah Hughes/Alaska Public Media)
Alaska State Troopers say the driver of a snowmachine that hit a dog team on the Denali Highway Monday, killing three dogs, is a test rider for a major manufacturer.
Troopers said Wednesday that the Minnesota man was in the area doing testing for Polaris when he hit the dog team east of Cantwell. No humans were hurt, but in addition to the dead dogs a fourth dog suffered serious injuries.
The dogs were in a team owned by longtime Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race veteran Jim Lanier of Chugiak and being driven by Mike Parker, who works at Lanier’s Northern Whites Kennel.
In an emailed statement, Polaris spokesperson Jess Rogers says the company wants to “express our deep sympathies to the family that lost three of their beloved sled dogs.”
Rogers added that safe riding is “central to how we operate, and we are fully cooperating with local law enforcement, as well as conducting our own internal investigation.”
Alaska State Troopers are still investigating the crash.
A DOTPF map of the route along which Kinross Gold plans to haul ore from the Manh Choh Mine near Tetlin to the Ft. Knox Mine mill north of Fairbanks. (Alaska Department of Transportation)
In Interior Alaska, a company is preparing to start production at a large gold mine near the Native Village of Tetlin. A former tribal chief greenlit the mine and leased mineral exploration rights to a mining venture, now led by Kinross Alaska.
But according to a story from the magazine Grist, the Tetlin Native Corporation and some tribal members are upset about the deal, alleging years of corruption and self-serving deals between tribal leaders and Kinross.
Kinross denies the allegations and says they’ve acted in good faith.
Grist reporter Lois Parshley says the saga of the Manh Choh Mine dates back decades, and includes disagreements over who owns the land around Tetlin.
Listen:
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Lois Parshley: To understand what’s going on here, I actually have to rewind a little further back to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which granted the Tetlin Native Corporation, a tribe in Interior Alaska, 743,000 acres. And unlike many village corporations Tetlin retained rights to its subsurface resources, like minerals. So, in the 1990s, Chief Donald Adams was both chief and president of the tribal corporation. And in his role as chief, he applied for a casino license, but it was denied because the corporation owned the tribe’s land. So to solve that problem, Chief Adams transferred about 640,000 acres from the corporation to the tribal council. This left the corporation insolvent, and the corporation shareholders, who never approved the move, sued. The Alaska Supreme Court eventually held that Chief Adams abused his authority in the “wrongful transfer.”
But before a new deed could be drawn up, Chief Adams signed a mineral lease with a mining exploration company in a closed-door meeting. It included 40,000 acres more than the Tetlin Native Corporation was ever allocated. The company also hired Chief Adams as a consultant and paid him more than $250,000. This broke tribal law, but the details of all of this were kept secret for years. In a notarized testimony, tribal council members said they were shocked when they finally saw the lease. And today Kinross Alaska, the majority owner and the current operator of the project, is developing a large open pit gold mine called Manh Choh on the land.
Wesley Early: So Adams died in 2015. How did Tetlin’s local leaders after him respond to this mine?
Lois Parshley: After Chief Adams died, a man named Michael Sam was elected, and new members joined the tribal council. But this change in leadership didn’t help resolve anything. When the general manager of the corporation sat down with Chief Sam in 2016, meeting notes suggest that Chief Sam didn’t know much about the mine, though he “stressed that it was his preference to see the miners leave.”
I wasn’t able to talk to Chief Sam. He didn’t respond to repeated interview requests. But it appears somewhere along the way his opinion about the mine changed. A tribal member is now collecting signatures to find out if Chief Sam or any other tribal officer is getting payments from Kinross that haven’t been made public.
Wesley Early: You describe allegations of corruption from the local Tetlin Native Corporation in your story. What do corporation officials claim happened with respect to the mine and Kinross?
Lois Parshley: In addition to his consulting fees, the lease shows that Chief Adams also approved a finder’s fee to the man who connected him with the mining company. It called him a “friend of the tribe,” and this arrangement said that he and his heirs will receive 10% of any future net profits from mineral exploration on the land, in perpetuity. It’s pretty unclear who knew at the time that the tribe had surrendered so much of its profits. And overall, Tetlin will only receive royalties of somewhere between 3 to 5% from Manh Choh, though similar mines elsewhere in Alaska often give tribes much higher returns, as well as sometimes partial ownership.
The Tetlin Native Corporation also alleges that this joint mining venture misrepresented the tribal council to both the state and the SEC as a village corporation, which is something anyone familiar with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act knows is not possible. And perhaps most importantly, they’re also claiming that at least some of the mine is being developed on the 100,000 acres the corporation has always retained.
Wesley Early: So with all of this concern from tribal members, not to mention lawsuits, where does that put the Manh Choh mine right now?
Lois Parshley: In addition to all of these allegations, the project is also facing another lawsuit. Kinross plans to haul ore around 250 miles along the public highways from the mine in Tetlin to Fort Knox outside of Fairbanks, and that has sparked a lot of concern from residents. It will also require replacing bridges and other road improvements. The Federal Highway Administration says Alaska’s Department of Transportation didn’t follow the necessary process to put these bridge replacements on the state planning documents.
A lawsuit filed in October by a citizen led group is seeking an injunction requiring the Department of Transportation to follow its own regulations before allowing Kinross ore to be hauled on public roads. But despite all of these concerns, the mine is slated to begin production by the end of the year.
Freshly made beds are seen in an unoccupied room at the Fairbanks emergency shelter, Interior Alaska center for Non-Violent Living on October 14, 2023. (Photo by Claire Stremple/Alaska Beacon)
When Kara Carlson experienced sexual assault as a teenager, she said it was traumatic but not shocking: “I was the last of my friends to experience sexual violence,” she said. “We live in this world where you have to prepare women for surviving trauma.”
She now runs the women’s emergency shelter, Interior Alaska Center for Non-Violent Living, where she has worked for nearly two decades. She has seen domestic and sexual violence affect generations of Alaskans in Fairbanks.
“I’ve been here long enough that I’ve seen moms come in, I’ve seen their kids come in. I’ve seen their kids in CourtView as perpetrators. We’ve served their kids as victims,” she said, adding that she has seen up to three generations pass through IAC’s doors. “The cycle keeps repeating because nothing — nothing’s changed.”
Without prevention services, Carlson said, the shelter cannot reduce violence: “We will operate like this forever and ever, with no change in numbers, because the shelter is a Band-Aid, is the place people come after something has happened.”
Despite the millions the state of Alaska spends on domestic violence programming, its families still experience some of the highest rates of domestic violence in the nation. Experts and advocates agree that significant increases in prevention work and community level support are necessary to slow the rate of domestic violence.
Studies show that children who are exposed to violence are more likely to perpetrate it. They are also more prone to struggle academically or have negative mental and physical health outcomes.
Interior Alaska Center for Non-Violent Living has prevention services, including a rehabilitation program that teaches perpetrators alternatives to violence. But Carlson said if she cannot find more funding to run that program, she may have to end it — even though she knows it can be effective.
“That’s where we have really failed in domestic violence”
Diane Casto, former director of the state’s Council on Domestic Violence and Sexual Abuse, said that, while government funding fuels the nonprofits and agencies that tend to domestic violence, only social change can stamp it out. And, from where she sits, the route to social change is community level prevention work.
Prevention, in the context of domestic violence, is usually education around healthy relationships. It can be aimed at youth, at adults in relationships, or even people who have caused harm.
“My goal since I started here in 2017 was to bring prevention up, bring services to those who harm up,” she said. Funding for prevention has increased slightly since she started, but ultimately, Casto said it is where the state has failed in its fight against domestic violence.
“We have a lot of grant money,” Casto said. Yearly, the council distributes more than $20 million in grants statewide.
But she said there is an imbalance that thwarts their ultimate goal of ending violence: “Ninety percent of our grant dollars go to victim services, 8% go to prevention, and 2% go to batterer intervention programs,” she said.
A sign outside of the emergency shelter in Fairbanks, Alaska on Sept. 14, 2023. Executive director Kara Carlson said she has seen generations of families pass through its doors. (Photo by Claire Stremple/Alaska Beacon)
In other words, most of the state’s investment in domestic violence goes to helping people after the violence happens. Casto said to actually end domestic violence, she needs prevention to be funded at the same rate as victim services. But she said that’s a tough ask because prevention work is time consuming, and it is hard to demonstrate success.
“Prevention takes years — generations — to change attitudes, beliefs and behaviors. And if you don’t give it that time, you’re not going to see change. And I think that’s where we have really failed in domestic violence,” she said. “Funding wants to see results and outcomes now.”
Casto said each year, she asks the state Legislature for more funding because the need for victim services is so great. She wants to invest in prevention so that, one day, the budget needed to protect people in crisis will shrink.
“The reality is: If we keep turning our head, if we don’t take responsibility, then it isn’t going to end,” she said.
Alaska’s prevention movement
There was a time when the state invested more heavily in prevention and domestic violence awareness, said Brenda Stanfill, who runs the state’s coalition of domestic violence shelters, called the Alaska Network on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault.
Stanfill said former Gov. Sean Parnell’s Choose Respect campaign and his investment in domestic violence prevention programs jump-started the movement to increase awareness and reduce domestic violence.
“In 2010 to 2015, we did a lot of things. We started talking about it very openly,” she said. “Prevention started in those five years. That was the first time we started doing prevention — violence prevention awareness and violence prevention activities out in villages and communities and urban hubs.”
She said kids did projects in school where they learned about healthy conflict resolution — and brought their new knowledge home to their parents. She said children’s observations could be a wake-up call for people who didn’t recognize their own damaging behavior: “If you have kids talking about what is respect, and how do we treat one another, and then maybe pointing out at home, ‘That’s not what I learned at school’ kind of thing — that works. It puts pressure,” she said.
That era was also the birth of what are called “batterer intervention programs,” a name Stanfill said she now regrets because of the way it labels perpetrators. The programs are for people who have perpetrated domestic violence, and they are aimed at teaching them nonviolent methods for resolving conflict.
Stanfill and other experts in the field have said those programs work if the offender is open to change, and she has seen how the classes can be effective. She recalled one session, where men were asked about conflict at home when they were growing up. One man said his family did not have that experience: if his mom got upset, his father would slap her, and the conflict would end. “He wasn’t being sarcastic. Truly, to him, that was no conflict,” she said. “There’s no conflict in his mind, so he’s got no other skills. That’s all he’s got.” The coursework provided him with nonviolent alternatives.
In 2009, Parnell pledged to end domestic violence in the state within a decade. His attorney general, now U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, vowed to increase prosecution for offenders. The Alaska Victimization Survey showed that then, between 2010 and 2015, there was a decrease in domestic violence. The latest survey, from 2015 to 2020, shows the rate has crept back up and is higher than it has been in the last decade.
Stanfill said the prevention movement was important because it got people talking about a subject that was once taboo. Now, she said nonviolence advocates need to take the next step.
“I don’t think we’ve given the answer for what we now need to do,” she said. “When it comes to domestic violence, I think that we’re still trying to figure out exactly what call to action are we doing? And I think that that’s something that we really, as a state, have got to spend some time thinking about.”
Thermosiphons, the row of black poles underneath the telephone wires, line the bank of the Kuskokwim River in Bethel. They were installed to keep the permafrost below ground frozen and prevent the bank from sliding into the river. (Photo courtesy Dr. Joey Yang)
There are already several inches of snow on the ground in Fairbanks, but you won’t find any surrounding Vladimir Romanovsky’s house. Romanovsky, a permafrost expert and professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, keeps the ground shoveled.
“My house, it’s right on the boundary between permafrost and non-permafrost,” he said.
Snow is an insulator; it keeps the ground several degrees warmer than the air. And if there is permafrost below his house, he doesn’t want to risk it thawing, potentially cracking the foundation or creating other structural problems.
“That’s why, just in case, I am shoveling snow around the house to make the ground colder. If there’s some deeper permafrost there, that will prevent it from thawing,” Romanovsky said.
Permafrost is the frozen layer of ground on or just under the Earth’s surface found in polar regions. Romanovsky is part of a team of international scientists who are trying to understand how quickly it’s thawing.
As the climate warms due to human-produced carbon emissions, the Earth’s upper layers of permafrost are at risk of disappearing. The rate it thaws has enormous financial consequences for communities living above permafrost now. Those include Fairbanks, Utqiagvik and dozens of villages in western, northern and Interior Alaska.
The team modeled different scenarios of warming to see the effects on permafrost and published their findings in August in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In severe warming scenarios they found that more than 75% of Earth’s near-surface permafrost, 10-13 feet below ground, will be gone by the end of the century. Even in more moderate warming scenarios, more than half will disappear.
Based on the air temperature data they recorded, Romanovsky said we’re heading toward that severe warming scenario already.
“We’re kind of on the higher end of the predictions [based on] the real changes in temperature,” he said.
That means three-quarters of the world’s near-surface permafrost is set to vanish by 2100.
This has major implications for cold-climate regions like Alaska, where permafrost covers the majority of the state and thawing is already well underway. One of the biggest impacts is to the built environment.
Buildings, homes, roads, and other infrastructure need stable surfaces to remain sturdy. But when the ground beneath is literally melting, those surfaces start to sink and become unstable. This is already a major problem for rural Alaska communities built on permafrost — and it’s going to get worse.
Ilya Benesch is the Arctic construction manager for the Cold Climate Housing Research Center in Fairbanks, which does building research and answers housing design questions. He said the center is fielding more frequent permafrost-related questions.
“I get calls regularly, it’s one of those steady themes: ‘Hey, I’ve got a sinkhole in my yard. Hey, how do I level my home?’” Benesch said. Lately even: “Do you know anybody that’s a house mover?”
These calls are a sign that climate change is progressing, Benesch said. “I personally think there’s only going to be more of this,” he said.
Benesch, a journeyman carpenter by trade, said there are lots of strategies for building on permafrost, like using continuous steel or wood beams to build a structure that’s rigid enough to handle sinking in places. The constraint is always cost.
“With technology nowadays, we can make it work, but it’s going to be very, very expensive,” said Dr. Joey Yang is a civil engineering professor at UAA.
Yang studies solutions for building on thawing permafrost in places like Bethel, Nome and Utqiagvik. Homes in these areas are often built on adjustable foundations that can be modified as the ground shifts below. Roads and other infrastructure require thermosiphons, big pipes that use cold surface air — or sometimes, air conditioning units — to cool the ground below and keep it from moving.
Yang said as permafrost thaw continues, these solutions will become more crucial — and more costly.
“I think as the climate is going the direction it was predicted, this is just life as usual, we just have to deal with it,” he said.
Scientists say the only thing that could stop permafrost thaw is to significantly curb global carbon emissions to slow warming. But for now, climate change is already here, Yang said, and Alaskans are shouldering the bill.
Strips of dried salmon are seen on June 25, 2009. Chum salmon runs on the Yukon River improved enough this year to allow some subsistence harvesting in Alaska, but chinook returns did not show a similar improvement. Returns of Canada-origin fish were particularly weak. (Photo by A.R.Nanouk/U.S. Fish and WIldlife Service)
Salmon runs on the Yukon River continued to be anemic this year, federal and state agencies reported, and there are far too few fish reaching Canada to meet goals set in a treaty between that nation and the United States.
The ongoing fall chum salmon run is the fifth lowest on record for the nearly 2,000-mile river, and the coho run has turned out to be the second lowest on record, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game reported on Tuesday.
There are enough fall chum salmon to allow subsistence fishing in one upriver area, the department reported: the Teedriinjik River, also known as the Chandalar River, a Yukon tributary. A subsistence harvest opened there in mid-September.
However, all other areas of the upper Yukon River basin, whether in Alaska or Canada, remain completely closed to chum or coho salmon fishing, the department said.
The Yukon River’s fall chum run followed a summer run that, though low, was substantially better than those of the past two years, according to a report issued jointly by the state Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The summer chum run, as measured by sonar at Pilot Station near the Yukon River’s mouth, was about 846,000 fish, within the range of the preseason forecast and within the goals for “escapement,” the term used to describe salmon returns to spawning grounds, said the report, issued Sept. 30. It was enough to allow for some subsistence harvest in Alaska this summer, and it was a marked improvement from the record-low 153,497 summer chum salmon counted at Pilot Station in 2021 and nearly twice the 463,806 summer chum counted there in 2022.
Chum salmon, one of Alaska’s five salmon species, return to spawning rivers in two general pulses categoried as summer and fall runs.
Unlike chum, chinook salmon failed to show significant improvement this year in the Yukon River, according to the joint state-federal report.
Only 58,500 chinook salmon were counted by sonar passing through the river at Pilot Station, just above last year’s record-low count of 48,439 Chinook according to the joint state-federal report. That is only about a third of the recent 10-year average for Yukon River chinook.
A section of the upper Yukon River flowing through the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve is seen on Sept. 10, 2012. The river flows through Alaska into Canada. A U.S.-Canada treaty aims to ensure that Alaskans and Canadians have enough Yukon River salmon to meet their needs. (Photo provided by National Park Service)
Of those chinook swimming through the river, only about 15,300 Canada-origin fish made it through the sonar station at Eagle, near the Canadian border, the report said. That is only about a third of the escapement goal, the report said.
As has been the case in past years, chinook and chum returns failed to meet targets under the U.S.-Canada Yukon River Salmon Agreement, an annex to the Pacific Salmon Treaty.
Chum returns, both in summer and fall, were about normal until recently, said Christy Gleason, a Fish and Game area biologist for the Yukon River region.
“Then in 2020, something happened in the North Pacific and all the stocks on the Yukon River crashed,” Gleason said.
Along with ocean problems, there seem to be changes in the upriver spawning areas that are particularly harmful to fish originating in Canada, she said. “The last couple of years, we’ve seen poor run strength of the Canadian stocks,” she said.
She pointed to an incident in 2016 in which rapid retreat of a Yukon Territory glacier abruptly changed the course of a river. That incident, which scientists refer to as a case of “river piracy,” has caused some of the sloughs where chum salmon typically spawn to run dry, she said.
For chinook, there are concerns that a parasitic disease is killing fish before they reach their upriver spawning locations. Government agencies and other entities have been investigating the level of infections caused by the parasite Ichthyophonus. Salmon acquire the parasite from prey eaten in the ocean, and severity of infections during river migrations increases with higher water temperatures, according to the Department of Fish and Game.
There are also concerns that too many Yukon River salmon are being intercepted at sea by large fishing vessels harvesting pollock and other species. That interception is known as bycatch. At its just-concluded October meeting, the federal North Pacific Fishery Management Council approved an analysis of potential rule changes aimed at limited chum salmon bycatch in the Bering Sea pollock harvests.
