Western

This story was updated at 10:55 a.m.

Searchers have found the wreckage of the Yute Air plane that’s been missing since Saturday morning and the body of the missing pilot. The Associated Press reports Troopers say responders tentatively identified the body found in the Cessna 207 Monday as that 47-year-old Blaze Highlander of Olympia, Washington. A team Sunday evening spotted the Cessna 207 in the Kwethluk River. Lt. Col. Candice Olmstead is with the Alaska National Guard.

“There was a Yute Air pilot flying a company aircraft helping with the search. He flew over what he believed was the wreckage about 40 miles southeast of Bethel in the Kwethluk river. Shortly after that a civil air patrol flew over to confirm as a secondary source that it was the wreckage and they were able to confirm that it was indeed,” said Olmstead.

Crews on a jet boat and helicopter left early this morning to go to the scene. Megan Peters is a spokesperson for the Alaska State Troopers.

“We have our troopers as well as other agencies, including the National Transportation Safety Board, going to the site to look at the wreckage, to look at the circumstances, to hopefully recover the pilot,” said Peters.

The plane left Bethel at about 8:30 Saturday morning for a maintenance check and should have been back in three hours. It never returned.

The National Transportation Safety Board has two investigators on scene. Clint Johnson, the chief of the Alaska Office says because there was no radio communication prior to the plane going down, the physical evidence is a big part of their early investigation. Recent rains are complicating the recovery of the partially-submerged aircraft.

“The water over the top of the wreckage has increased, which will make it more difficult for them to get those parts and pieces out of the water,” said Johnson.

There were no passengers besides the pilot as it was on a maintains check flight following engine work. Johnson says his team is reviewing maintenance records and once the 207 is removed from the water, they hope to study it in Bethel or Anchorage.

“Obviously because this was a maintenance operation check flight, that was the reason for the flight, we want to make sure we don’t miss anything that may be mechanically wrong with the airplane,” said Johnson.

Johnson says the agency hopes to have a preliminary accident report in five days. The full investigation may take a year.

Yute Air offices in Bethel were closed yesterday and remain closed today. Yute Air serves the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, providing flights for passengers and freight to more than 20 surrounding villages as well as charters around the state.

Original story:

Searchers have found the wreckage of the Yute Air plane that’s been missing since Saturday morning. A team Sunday evening spotted the Cessna 207 in the Kwethluk River. Lt. Col. Candice Olmstead is with the Alaska National Guard.

“There was a Yute Air pilot flying a company aircraft helping with the search. He flew over what he believed was the wreckage about 40 miles southeast of Bethel in the Kwethluk River. Shortly after that a Civil Air Patrol flew over to confirm as a secondary source that it was the wreckage and they were able to confirm that it was indeed,” Olmstead said.

Crews on a jet boat and helicopter left early this morning to go to the scene, says Megan Peters, a spokesperson for the Alaska State Troopers.

“We have our troopers as well as other agencies, including the National Transportation Safety Board, going to the site to look at the wreckage, to look at the circumstances, to hopefully recover the pilot,” said Peters.

The plane left Bethel at about 8:30 a.m. Saturday for a maintenance check and should have returned three hours later.

Yute Air offices in Bethel were closed yesterday and remain closed today. Yute Air serves the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, providing flights for passengers and freight to more than 20 surrounding villages as well as charters around the state.

 

This is part 3 of a 3-part series from KYUK in Bethel. 

State law enforcement officials say heroin gets into Bethel mainly on low-security, small airline passenger flights.

Bethel City Manager, Ann Capela, says the trouble heroin is causing in Bethel requires a coordinated campaign not unlike the one that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security developed with the goal of rooting out terrorists. Although Bethel’s heroin campaign is on a smaller scale, it uses the same slogan:

“If you see something, say something,” said Capela.

Capela, who was hired about six months ago, says the city doesn’t have the capacity to take on multinational drug rings, so the community must work together to root out dealers and traffickers, who have set in motion a slew of problems impacting everything from OCS cases to fire and police calls.

“We need the information from the community. We don’t have the manpower to be, but we need to be our eyes and ears [about] what’s going on. They need to let us know,” said Capela.

Capela says the idea is to support a grassroots effort already brewing in the community. One aspect of the campaign promotes a tip line that goes straight to the Alaska State Troopers Western Alaska Alcohol & Narcotics Team – or WAANT. Capela says the city also hopes to work with social services and health care providers, tribes and others to get addicts the help they need to quit.

At a meeting in which the Bethel City Council tasked city administration with making a heroin action plan, Councilmember Mark Springer said the heroin problems have gotten so bad, that they need to call in reinforcements.

“We would be happy to see as much law enforcement pressure as possible against people who are importing narcotics into Bethel and selling them here. As I said before, it’s criminal conspiracy, it’s organized crime in no uncertain terms,” said Springer.

Alan Wilson, a supervisor with the Drug Enforcement Administration in Anchorage, says law enforcement needs tips from people on the ground in Bethel to help.

Wilson says it’s happening across the country. After regulators cracked down on prescription drugs, like Oxycontin, and reformulated them to be less attractive to addicts, heroin found a market again.

“We have drug traffickers that we know have contacts in Mexico and they purchase their heroin either in Mexico or on the border of Mexico in the United States and they ship it up to Alaska,” said Wilson.

Todd Moehring is an investigator with WAANT. He says heroin makes its way to Bethel and other bush communities, in smaller quantities.

“We’re not receiving pounds directly from Mexico on a freight aircraft or something like that, but we’re receiving user amounts. Typically what we’ve learned so far is that most of the dealers have roughly a gram of heroin or more, so that’s usually around 10 hits on a user level, maybe up to an ounce or so – again, because we are at the end of the line,” said Moehring.

Moehring says they’re after source dealers and traffickers. He says it’s coming through mail, freight services and the port. But he says a lot comes in simply on passengers on smaller airlines serving Bethel.

“Smaller airlines that operate under different federal rules, and the security screening is not the same as we get for your larger commercial jets. So folks are carrying drugs in their baggage, they’re carrying it on their person, in their clothing, they’re also doing it on internal body carry,” said Moehring.

Under federal regulation small airlines, which carry less than 50 passengers, are not required to participate in TSA screening. A spokesperson for RAVN Alaska, the main smaller airline that serves Bethel, declined to go on tape. She said via email: “It’s not our policy to search bags. If we have reasonable suspicion that someone may have an illegal substance or item in their bag, we pull the bag and call the troopers or local police authority.” City Manager Capela says she wonders if a drug dog would help.

“I don’t know whether we would require a K-9 unit that looks at the cargo when it comes down. A K-9 unit just as people are going by,” said Capela.

Troopers with the WAANT team say they have requested a drug dog for their Bethel office, but state of Alaska officials say they don’t have the resources to provide one. Moehring says the Anchorage WAANT office just got a drug dog to stop the flow of heroin and other narcotics out of the city. The dog is funded by the North Slope Borough, and will focus on that region but could also be used to follow up on tips from Bethel.

 

New research on the Nushagak River, one of the largest Chinook salmon runs in the world, used chemical tags in a fish’s ear bones to tell where it was born and raised. Sean Brennan is a post-doctoral student at the University of Washington’s School of Aquatic and Fisheries Sciences. He and his team hope the study research will help managers better understand how their fisheries work.

When you catch a salmon in the bay, how do you know where it came from? That’s long been a challenge put to fishery managers who need that information to make decisions about catch and escapement.

A new study, published in the May 15 edition of Science Advances, hones in on habitats where Chinook salmon are born and raised by tracking chemical tags in the fish’s otolith.

Sean Brennan, then a doctoral student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, led the research in Bristol Bay’s Nushagak River.

In June of 2011, Brennan spent several days on the docks of Peter Pan Seafoods in Dillingham, dissecting the heads of Chinooks that were on their way to be processed. He collected 255 otoliths, or “ear bones,” using tweezers to pull out the thin white discs.

Brennan wanted the otoliths because they contain a chemical souvenir of the fish’s travels: the element strontium. And as he puts it, “not all strontium is created equal.” Some of the strontium in earth is heavier, and some is lighter. Those different weights, called strontium isotopes, are found in the bedrock of Bristol Bay. Water flowing over these rocks picks up dissolved strontium, which makes its way into the bodies of fish.

Over a fish’s life strontium isotopes are deposited onto the tiny ear bone in layers.

“The different stretches of rivers the fish are in are essentially tagging the otolith at that particular time in that fish’s life,” Brennan says.

Co-authors Diego Fernandez and Thure Cerling at the University of Utah analyzed these chemical tags, reading the strontium layers like rings on a tree stump. Matthew Wooller and Megan McPhee at UAF also co-authored the study.

Using ear bone data from juvenile fish in the upper Nushagak, researchers put together a map of the strontium isotopes in different areas of the watershed. By comparing that map to the strontium in ear bones, Brennan and his team were able to reconstruct each fish’s life history.

One exciting result of the research, Brennan says, is that he can now identify seven distinct zones — seven strontium isotope groups — in the Nushagak watershed.

“So when we catch Chinook salmon in Nushagak Bay, we now have the ability to determine which of those seven groups produced that particular fish,” he says.

This is a big deal to scientists like Brennan. Other tracing methods, like genetics, paint broader strokes; there’s just not enough genetic variation between Chinook populations in Bristol Bay. But the strontium isotope method can tell the precise tributary where a fish hatched in the Nushagak, and how long it stayed there.

Brennan’s results indicate that 70 percent of Nushagak Chinook stay in their natal streams until they make a beeline for open ocean. But 20 percent, he says, move earlier, spending an extended period of time in the lower main stem Nushagak before migrating to the ocean. It’s like a small group of teenaged salmon have a hangout spot that scientists didn’t know much about before.

“What’s interesting about that,” Brennan says, “is the common thought is that the lower Nushagak doesn’t produce that many fish.”

The new research shows that, in fact, the lower Nushagak is home to a fifth of juvenile Chinook for a significant time period before they leave the river.

These results also indicate the life histories of Nushagak-born Chinook are more varied than previously expected; some juveniles stay in their natal streams longer, while some move out earlier.

It’s this variety of behaviors and life histories that make the Nushagak Chinook population so resilient to changes in the environment, says Christian Zimmerman, a USGS ecologist who advised and co-authored the study.

“Say it’s a really cold winter; that might benefit fish that leave later,” he says. “But a warm winter pays off for fish that leave sooner.”

This new tracking tool is just another way to understand that resilience.

On a broader scale, Zimmerman says the strontium isotope method could help fishery managers in Alaska and beyond better understand year-to-year changes in productivity. Knowing where a catch comes from, he says, gives you more power in determining how many fish you can sustainably harvest.

“One of the things we hear throughout Western Alaska is that when we see declines [in salmon returns], it’s a bit of a surprise,” Zimmerman says.

Scientists hope this tool will take some of that surprise out of the equation, helping predict changes to the environment that may affect salmon runs.

“Our hope is to better understand how freshwater habitats relate to productivity,” Zimmerman says. “So you wouldn’t suddenly find a year where commercial or subsistence fishing would have to be regulated, like it has on the Kuskokwim River. You would have some idea that it was happening beforehand.”

That may be a few years off, but Zimmerman says researchers intend to use isotope tracking on the Kuskokwim and Yukon Rivers soon.

For now, Brennan is working with Daniel Schindler at the University of Washington, where they will expand their research to include sockeye salmon on the Nushagak. They plan to collect three years of Chinook data and two years of sockeye by the end of the project.

But it doesn’t end with fish. Brennan says strontium isotopes could help track migratory mammals like caribou or seal as well.

“Being able to link highly mobile species to the critical habitats that they use in the critical times of their life is a fundamental piece of information when you’re trying to come up with some sort of conservation strategy,” Brennan says. “This tool provides a reliable way to do that.”

 

This is part 2 of a 3-part series from KYUK in Bethel. 

Heroin imported to Alaska quickly reaches rural communities. Those communities are now pushing back. The City of Bethel is organizing a multi-agency heroin task force.

Heroin-related calls are putting a strain on city services and the Bethel Police, according to Chief Andre Achee. He says the department isn’t intercepting much heroin on the streets, but they are responding to an increasing number of thefts.

“What we’re dealing with is the events that are sort of a nexus to heroin: the thefts, the burglaries, the domestic disturbances, stuff being soldthrough various individuals online, offline, things being stolen even from family members,” said Achee.

He says addicts steal things they can turn over for quick cash.

“Anything from fire arms to vehicles – any type of property that people could sell,” said Achee.

Achee says, sometimes thieves resort to stealing traditional Alaska Native subsistence foods.

“We’ve had thefts of berries: salmonberries, blueberries being sold just for people to get enough money for their dependency,” said Achee.

When the victims are family members, they often don’t want to press charges, says Achee, they just want their items back, which he says perpetuates the cycle and keeps the understaffed police department racing from call-to-call. The fire department’s ambulance crew is also seeing more heroin-related calls, according to city officials. Heroin is also taking a toll on children and families according to Fennisha Gardner, who has worked in and out of the Office of Children’s Services in Bethel since 1999. She says she had never seen the drug come up in their cases until recently.

“I didn’t even see the presence of heroin when I was here the first time or the second time. It has been an explosion of heroin coming into this community and affecting the families,” said Gardner.

The result, Gardner says, is more neglect and other situations that put kids in danger.

“Using substances while having your children in the household, having a criminal element in the household while using with your children there. We also have had children born with heroin in their system,” said Gardner.

The Western office of OCS is handling an increasing number of cases involving babies withdrawing from heroin, Gardner says, and trying to ensure they get proper treatment once they’re born.

The City Council has taken notice of the problems and one council member, Byron Maczynski, has been using his position to work on the issue, bringing it up in discussion at city council meetings. That recently resulted in a threat. One morning he found a type-written note in the driver’s seat of his Jeep. It said:

“You’d better back off the heroin issue before you end up killing yourself. If you call the police we will know about it, haha and the next time I see you walking outside your shop, you won’t make it back in,” said Maczynski.

Police are investigating. He says the threat was unnerving, but it just made him want to push harder. At a recent Bethel City Council meeting he did just that.

“Next on the agenda, Action Memorandum 1516, Community Action against heroin and other elicit drugs,” said Bethel Mayor Rick Robb

Bethel Mayor Rick Robb introduced Maczynski’s Action Memorandum, directing the administration to work with community groups to address the heroin problem. Maczynski read a list of possible things the city could work on:

“Provide anti-drug education in middle school and high schools, disseminate information to community members on how to obtain help, educate community members about what to look for to determine drug use and sales, to include how and where to report,” said Maczynski.

Maczynski called on the city to act.

“Sometimes it’s too late, but it’s not too late for a lot of people out there. And we could really help these people. I hope this community could come together. It’s sad. We need to do something,” said Maczynski.

Council Members discussed the need for a treatment center specifically for heroin addiction in Bethel and agreed the city needs to work with law enforcement to crack down on drug dealers. Since the meeting, Bethel’s City Manager, Ann Capella, says she has been working on putting together a multi-agency community task force to address Bethel’s heroin problems.

 

This is part 1 of a 3-part series from KYUK in Bethel. 

Federal officials say in 2014 they intercepted nearly ten times as much heroin coming into Alaska than in 2013. The growing use of the drug is impacting urban and rural areas. This is the first in a series of three stories about the impacts of heroin in Bethel and how the community is fighting it. It begins with one woman’s struggle to get clean in Bethel.

Don’t be fooled by Tracy Faulkner’s 5’4” frame. The small brunette with thick hair and the nickname Malaggai, which means “fur hat” in Yup’ik, is a former wrestling champion.

She competed against boys in high school, going all the way to state and national competition. But in her off time she hid a dark secret.

“When I wasn’t training I would go and use — steal my parents’ booze, you know, find weed. It eventually progressed to taking pills,” said Faulkner.

That started when she was 12. One semester into college drugs started taking a priority over schoolwork. She dropped out and returned to Bethel where she tried school again, but her drug use intervened. She started a food truck business, but couldn’t maintain that either. That’s when Faulkner’s need for escape escalated.

“I got addicted to Tramadol – started taking that, eventually it wasn’t doing the trick for me anymore – I wanted that same high which I first got in the beginning. Then went to OxyContin, and then went to using heroin,” said Faulkner.

Faulkner smoked it. Others inject. She couldn’t hold a job and was stealing to support her habit. Each high, or ‘nifty’ as they’re called, cost $100 here.

There are no treatment programs specifically for heroin addiction in Bethel. Treatment centers in Anchorage have waiting lists. Rick Robb is Bethel’s Mayor and also runs residential facilities for the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation.  “It seems like a few years ago it would be non-existent to rare, but now we’re seeing full-blown heroin and we’re seeing it more and more. So the numbers are definitely increasing,” said Robb.

YKHC’s behavioral health division offers outpatient and inpatient treatment for those struggling to get off drugs and alcohol. But there are only 16 beds at the local center and they’re not equipped to handle heroin withdrawal. Sometimes, Robb says, people endure the painful process in the hospital emergency room or at home.

“People can come in if they have a problem, and we’re gonna do the best we can with the resources we have to get people the help they need. I think we have to. There’s some emphasis on us. We have to improve our programing specifically for heroin and we have to learn more about it,” said Robb.

Faulkner says she distinctly remembers the day this winter when she gazed out the window at a friend’s house and realized she wanted to make a change.

“I remember looking out on the river and just seeing everybody living life and I was stuck in this dark place,” said Faulkner.

But with no detox facility in Bethel, Faulkner realized it would have to be cold turkey. She reached out to an uncle for help. He cared for her as she went through withdrawal.

“You get sick to your bones; I mean you want to crawl out of your skin. You lay in bed all day. You have the shakes, the sweats, you know. You’re puking, out the other end, you know it’s bad to where I couldn’t get out of bed,” said Faulkner.

After detox at home, she was ready to check herself into the local treatment program run by YKHC. But it wasn’t an easy process. YKHC told her it could take weeks to get an assessment necessary to access treatment. Instead of waiting she got the assessment at a local primary care clinic and was able to check in to in-patient treatment through YKHC within a few days. Robb, with YKHC, says he knows they need to do a better job of getting patients quickly into treatment. Now Faulkner is done with her treatment program. She says she gains strength from her ancestors and from her young son, who she says deserves to grow up in a healthy environment.

“It’s our younger generation that’s going to be most affected by this. I mean, our heritage, our culture is gonna be lost. For me, looking at my own child, I don’t want him to grow up in this kind of community. I want him to grow up in the community that I was raised in. Where we showed love for each other, where we cared for each other, where we stood as one,” said Faulkner.

Faulkner says she knows she’s in a unique position to help unite people in the region around the issue, and now that she’s clean that will be her focus.

A Tooksook Bay teenager who became a singing sensation on Facebook performed for ambassadors and Arctic VIPs at the State Department in Washington D.C. last week.

Secretary of State John Kerry introduced Byron Nicholai at a reception to mark the beginning of the U.S. Chairmanship of the Arctic Council. The two-year rotating chairmanship gives each arctic country an opportunity to set priorities. The United States has selected ocean safety, security, improving living conditions and climate change. Kerry described the balance:

“We have to implement the framework that we’ve developed to reduce emissions of black carbon and methane in the Arctic, and at the same time we have to foster economic development that will raise living standards and help make renewable energy sources the choice for everybody.”

Alaska leaders have urged the State Department to focus beyond climate change and recognize the needs of Arctic people. That message came through in Kerry’s speech.

“As beautiful as it is, (the Arctic) is not just a picturesque landscape,” Kerry said. “It’s a home. It’s a lifestyle. It has a history, and those folks deserve as much respect for that as anybody else in any other habitat on the earth.”

Nicholai was the only performer at the reception in the ornate Benjamin Franklin room of the State Department. He is 17, and has more than 16,000 followers on his Facebook page “I sing. You dance.”