Military

Seven hunters, including a child, from Pilot Station were rescued after being stuck at a fish camp for one week. The group was headed upriver after fall seal hunting. They got stuck outside of the Yukon River community of Emmonak on their way home.

The group was rescued Thursday night by the U.S. Coast Guard, according to Pilot Station Search and Rescue. A Coast Guard spokesperson said the group was immediately transported to the airport in Nome where they were checked for injuries.

It’s traditional for hunters from lower Yukon River villages to travel down to the coast in the fall to hunt for seal to stock their freezers for the winter. Especially this year, since subsistence fishing for most salmon species was closed after the Yukon River saw a massive chum salmon collapse.

Normally hunters are able to get to the coast and back home this time of year without any problem, but former Pilot Station Mayor Abraham Kelly said that winter weather snuck up on them this year.

“It got cold a lot faster than what we thought,” Kelly said.

As the hunters made their way upriver, ice began forming across the water. Just past Emmonak, they couldn’t go any further. Four of the seven hunters volunteer with the local search and rescue in Pilot Station, so they knew to contact the nearby Emmonak Search and Rescue from their inReach device. According to Emmonak Search and Rescue, the hunters provided their location and the Emmonak group directed them to the nearest fish camp.

The hunters were forced to pull over their boat on Oct. 29. Between what they brought and what was at the fish camp, they had enough to feed themselves and stay warm for several days. But according to Alaska State Troopers, the weather soon turned foggy and turbulent and it was too risky to land an aircraft. On Sunday — day three — troopers were able to do a fly-by drop-off of food, supplies and medicine needed by one of the hunters in the group.

The group needed to be rescued by air because the river and overland trails aren’t frozen enough yet for snowmachines or other vehicles. The entire area is off the road system.

Back in Pilot Station, the head of the local search and rescue group, Paul Fancyboy, got word that his friends and his second-in-command were stuck near Emmonak. He was concerned that no one had rescued them yet. So on Monday — day four — he said he called Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s office. He reached an aide.

“He said he was taking notes and he’s gonna give it to the governor,” Fancyboy said. “I wouldn’t know why he hasn’t called me back about why it took so long for those guys to get rescued.”

Fancyboy said the governor never called him back. The governor’s office said they provided Fancyboy with another number to call.

The next day — day five — troopers attempted to evacuate the group with a fixed-wing plane. But according to a spokesperson for Emmonak Search and Rescue, the pilot couldn’t land due to a heavy crosswind. The spokesperson said the men were starting to get agitated that it had been five days and no one had picked them up yet.

Emmonak Search and Rescue coordinated another fly-by food drop, this time food was donated by the local AC store and the village store and the flight was donated by Grant Aviation. The drop included a charger for the hunters’ inReach satellite. The group is using it to communicate with Emmonak Search and Rescue. The mood at camp briefly lifted, plus the weather was looking good for the next day.

Emmonak Search and Rescue told the hunters to pack up their gear and get ready. The U.S. Coast Guard’s helicopter in Nome prepared to pick them up. But on Wednesday — day six — the chopper never came. The weather turned once more, according to Kelly.

“Finally they were gonna pick them up yesterday morning, and then that fog rolled in again so they canceled the chopper from Nome,” Kelly said.

He said that another fog bank had rolled in on Thursday, and the Coast Guard confirmed that they had not been able to get the boaters. Emmonak Search and Rescue coordinated a third food drop, and Kelly was concerned about the group’s ability to keep warm.

Fancyboy, the head of Pilot Station Search and Rescue, said that the whole village was worried about the hunters. He said the youngest in the group was a grade-school kid who missed school this week. Fancyboy said he’s frustrated.

“I don’t know what’s taking them so long,” he said. “It is not acceptable.”

A spokesperson from Emmonak Search and Rescue also demanded to know why it had been taking so long for government rescue agencies to get the hunters.

According to a report from troopers, the Coast Guard helicopter in Nome had been unable to launch Thursday due to mechanical issues, and there were no private helicopters available in the area to help. Troopers said two U.S. Army helicopters from Fort Wainwright were traveling to the area and planned to pick up the group on Friday.

The group ended up being picked up Thursday night. Medical personnel met the hunters at the airport checked them for injuries and they were brought to a hotel, according to a troopers spokesperson.

Pilot Station Search and Rescue said the group initially believed they would be paying out-of-pocket for the hotel and travel home, but troopers told KYUK they would be covering the costs of lodging and airfare home to Pilot Station.

The Air Force plans to build a small nuclear power plant on Eielson Air Force Base that would generate up to half of the installation’s electricity needs. Air Force officials say the so-called microreactor is part of a pilot project to test the viability of using nuclear power to ensure military installations can continue operating after they lose their main source of electricity.

Air Force officials came up with the plan to build a microreactor at Eielson after the agency adopted a policy a few years ago to ensure its installations could continue to carry out their missions even if they lose their primary source of electricity.

Which, in this case, is Eielson’s 70-year-old coal-fired heat and power plant.

“This is really about energy resilience,” says Mark Correll, a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force who oversees management of the service’s environment-, safety- and infrastructure-related issues.

“We’re looking to make sure that at any point in time, any of our bases with any mission will have the power it needs, where it needs it, when it needs it, in the quantities that it needs, to assure that we can continue to do the defense mission that we have,” he said.

Correll says a provision in the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act required the Defense Department to build a microreactor and ensure it’s operational by 2027.

“We expect to meet that goal without any difficulty, and we expect to do that at Eielson,” he said in news conference Friday.

Correll says the Air Force chose Eielson because it’s an important installation that’s located in a relatively isolated area, about 20 miles south of Fairbanks. And he says that if its 15-megawatt heat and power plant were to go offline, the base has only one backup source of electricity – Golden Valley Electric Association.

He says in that situation, the microreactor would continue generating electricity to keep parts of the base operating. But Eielson does not have a backup source of steam heat, which would be a serious problem during the winter.

“If that central heat and power plant goes down,” Correll said, “we’ve got some real issues on the installation, besides just being able to launch aircraft.”

A local energy expert says another possible reason Eielson was chosen for the pilot project is that it’s a very expensive base to operate.

“Of all the Air Force bases, it is the one that has the highest energy cost overall,” says Gwen Holdmann, who directs the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Alaska Center for Energy and Power.

Holdmann told the Fairbanks Economic Development Corporation Tuesday that the microreactor could serve as a backup source of heat.

“It would probably meet all of the base’s needs, in terms of thermal energy,” she said during an online meeting conducted by the Fairbanks Economic Development Corporation.

Eielson on average needs 10-15 megawatts daily to operate, and demand sometimes peaks as high as 25 megawatts.

Correll says the Air Force did not include the base’s aging power plant among its reasons for selecting Eielson for the microreactor. But he says the potential reduction in emissions that it could facilitate is an additional welcome benefit.

“There’s no doubt that the elimination of greenhouse gases as a result of that is integral are extraordinarily positive, and we’re happy to do it,” he said. “But it wasn’t the main focus.”

Correll says the microreactor would be contained in a structure that’s about the size of a conex shipping container that’ll be located in a site of about 5 acres.

He says it won’t cost the Air Force any money upfront. Instead, it’ll pay for it through power purchases from the company that’ll build and operate it, at a rate that’s competitive with what the base pays now.

“The discussions we’ve had with a couple of companies that are doing this,” Correll said. “They assert that their cost to produce power is going to be comparable to what it costs us to produce it or what it would cost us to buy it from Golden Valley.”

Correll says the Air Force hopes to begin soliciting proposals from qualified companies in February and will select a vendor later in the year. The service will then begin working on licenses and permits from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which will oversee the project.

Construction of the microreactor will begin in 2025, and it’s scheduled to begin operation in 2027.

Members of an Alaska Air National Guard unit at Joint Base Elmendorf Richardson detected and tracked five Russian aircraft that flew near Alaska last week.

The Alaska Air National Guard’s 176^th  Wing identified the Russian aircraft on Oct. 21 when they entered international airspace off Alaska.

A news release issued by the wing Monday says its Air Defense Squadron continued tracking the aircraft as they flew through the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone, then relayed that information to the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD.

A NORAD news release says the Russian aircraft entered the identification zone at about 6 p.m. Thursday and left about 90 minutes later. The news release didn’t say from which direction the aircraft approached Alaska.

The Air National Guard’s news release says the 176^th Air Defense Squadron’s surveillance and weapons teams identified the Russian aircraft with help from the JBER-based 611th Air Operations Center. The Russian formation included an AWACS-type reconnaissance and control plane, two Su-35 Flanker jet fighters and two Tu-95 Bear long-range bombers.

It’s unclear whether U.S. fighters were scrambled to escort the Russian aircraft through the identification zone. That’s what the Air Force did more than dozen times last year to intercept more than 60 Russian planes that had entered the identification zone off Alaska and Canada.

Observers say last week’s Russian aircraft incursion off Alaska was the first since January.

Lieutenant General David Krumm, who heads the Alaskan Command, said that was the busiest spate of Russian aircraft incursions since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled Lt. Gen. David Krumm’s name. It is David Krumm, not David Crumm.

A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter crew rescued a man whose sailboat had overturned on Oct. 11 while sailing solo across the Gulf of Alaska about 145 miles west of Sitka.

The Coast Guard received an emergency call shortly after 3 p.m. alerting them to the GPS location of a mariner in distress.

Coast Guard Commander Rand Semke was the co-pilot on the case. He said they gathered little information from an emergency beacon signal, but not much more than the location, and the name and registration information for the Ananda — a small sailing yacht on a long-distance voyage.

“We did not know anything about the nature of distress, we could make some assumptions based on the weather that we were seeing that a sailboat out there would be having some difficulty,” Semke said. “But we didn’t know how many people were on board or really why the beacon was activated.”

Semke and three other helicopter crew members from Air Station Sitka took off around 4 p.m., heading into a storm that was blowing 70 knots with 25-foot seas.

“So that was that was primarily what was going through our mind is can we do this with the weather and the gas on the helicopter in the amount of time that we can,” Semke said. “We wanted to get going quickly because a rescue in this type of weather is much easier to accomplish in the daylight than at night. And we knew sunset was coming quick.”

 

A U.S. Coast Guard crew rescued a man whose sailboat overturned while sailing solo across the Gulf of Alaska about 145 miles west of Sitka. A commander said the radio beacon that sent the man’s geolocation to the Coast Guard saved his life.

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Semke said about a quarter of an hour before they reached the source of the emergency beacon’s signal, they made contact with the mariner on the radio, and learned that his 33-foot sailboat was adrift on its side. It had lost its sails and rigging and had a broken rudder.

The unnamed sailor told them he was alone and was still aboard the crippled vessel in his Gumby survival suit.

About five minutes before the rescue team sighted the Ananda, they’d lost radio contact. Luckily, rescue swimmer Juan Espinosa Gomez was able to spot the vessel – a tiny spot lit up on their infrared cameras. The team hovered over the drifting sailboat and lowered Espinosa Gomez into the hostile waters.

“The seas were all still 30 feet. And as I came across the back or the stern of the boat, I made eye contact to the survivor and I yelled at him to get in the water. He looked back at me he retreated back into his cabin, came back out with some luggage,” Espinosa Gomez said. “He had like a Pelican case wrapped in a life vest. And I commanded him to climb up and jump off the leeward side of the vessel so that the wind wouldn’t get in between him and the vessel.”

Espinosa Gomez said he helped the man swim away from the Ananda, and as it drifted away they were hoisted in the air by the rest of the crew. The man was cold, but not hypothermic, and had no apparent physical injuries. The team then made its way to Yakutat, landing around 8 p.m., and the man was treated by medics on the ground.

Coast Guard Commander Semke said there are a lot of lessons to learn from the man’s hazardous voyage, but first and foremost is preparation.

“Especially open ocean voyages, that can be certainly hazardous especially in this area. So using really all available tools for anticipating weather forecasts and sea state,” Semke said. “Where this mariner did succeed was his preparation in putting his survival suit on early and being ready to abandon ship if necessary, as well as monitoring [VHF] channel 16, which is always something that really every mariner should do, no matter how short their voyage.”

But the biggest factor in the man’s survival? The radio beacon that sent his geolocation to the Coast Guard.

“Without that there really is no way the Coast Guard would have been alerted to his distress,” Semke said. “So that really was what saved his life,” Semke said.

Military leaders in Alaska told state lawmakers on Tuesday that a lack of housing and concerns about schools make it hard to attract military families to the state. 

Air Force Lt. Gen. David Krumm said the Air Force isn’t allowing service members to bring their families to Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks due to a lack of housing. He said the Air Force is working at every level of government to address the problem. 

“But we’d really love your help in making sure that builders are incentivized to build homes,” he said. “We are bringing people. We want them to bring their families.”

Krumm pointed out that there will be a demand for Air Force members at Eielson, with F-35 fighter aircraft based there.

Krumm and other military leaders spoke to the Legislature’s Joint Armed Services Committee at an annual meeting that was delayed by COVID-19. 

Krumm said he’s also focused on schools and childcare to improve the quality of life for Air Force families in the state. He cited the low number of teachers and counselors per student compared with some other states as being sources of concern for military families. 

And he said many other states make it easier for military spouses to work by being more flexible in accepting professional licenses from other states. 

Army Maj. Gen. Brian Eifler also talked about the importance of housing. He pointed to improvements the Army is planning for the barracks at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, including a new building planned by 2030.

And Coast Guard Rear Adm. Nathan Moore said the pandemic has been particularly difficult for those stationed in parts of the state that are far from military bases. 

“We certainly feel like our Coast Guard men and women that are in these remote locations have had a rough year and a half,” he said. “The COVID restrictions have been tough on people, both from a resiliency standpoint (and) a mental health standpoint.”

The leaders also address lawmakers’ questions about COVID-19 vaccinations.

Krumm said the Air Force is educating members on the vaccine, which has been ordered for all members except those who have valid medical or religious reasons for not receiving it. He says 2-2.5% of Air Force members in the state are seeking exemptions.

Krumm also says COVID-19 restrictions imposed on the military in the state have helped. 

“We have proven that we have minimized the spread of COVID-19 on our installations when we implement mitigation measures,” such as wearing masks and maintaining social distancing, Krumm said. 

More National Guard members have asked for vaccine exemptions. Maj. Gen. Torrence Saxe, the Alaska National Guard adjutant general, said 5-10% want exemptions so far.

Wasilla Republican Sen. Mike Shower said it’s important to him that military members aren’t “kicked to the curb” and denied future benefits if they refuse the vaccines.

The U.S. Navy says its operations in Southeast Alaska won’t increase over the next seven years. It announced on Oct. 1 that it will continue training and equipment testing in the Northwest Testing and Training Area — which includes Southeast Alaska — under what it calls its “preferred alternative.”

In Southeast Alaska, that mostly consists of measuring the sound signature of submarines at the Southeast Alaska Acoustic Measurement Facility (SEAFAC) in the Behm Canal near Ketchikan.

The Navy says it won’t be testing any weapons in Southeast Alaska waters and only proposes one or two sonar tests per year at SEAFAC.

NOAA Fisheries granted a final permit for the Navy to conduct its training activities last November. The permit authorizes the possible impact the Navy might have on marine life over the next seven years of training and testing.

In Alaska, the permit includes permission to behaviorally harass marine mammals more than 16,000 times throughout the next seven years.

Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Navy must submit an environmental impact statement for its Northwest Training and Testing Area. The statement includes projected impacts to marine life and some mitigation efforts. The Navy released the final supplement to its EIS last September.

The federal agencies tasked with protecting marine mammals then evaluate the EIS and approve a permit for harm. The Navy is not allowed to physically harm or kill any marine mammals in Southeast Alaska over the next seven years, but it is permitted thousands of what it calls behavioral disturbances. That can include disruption to feeding, interactions or travel from place to place.

The Navy’s calculation of its disturbance to marine mammals and other ocean-dwellers is theoretical. It does not keep track of actual harm done to animals during training exercises, instead using the number of training and testing activities as a tool to estimate marine impacts.

Environmental groups have expressed concern that the Navy does not do enough to mitigate its impact on marine life — from larger marine mammals like whales and porpoises down to fish populations and zooplankton.