Public Safety

Update, Friday:

No survivors were found on board the Bering Air plane that went missing in the Nome area Thursday when searchers discovered it Friday afternoon, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

In a post on X, the Coast Guard said three people were found dead inside of the plane. The agency did not mention the other seven on board.

The plane was found about 34 miles southeast of Nome, the Coast Guard said.

Original story:

City officials plan to hold a press conference at 5 p.m. to provide further details. KNOM will livestream the conference on its Facebook, YouTube and radio signals.

A massive search is ongoing Friday for a Bering Air plane with 10 on board that departed Unalakleet Thursday and failed to arrive in Nome, officials said.

Flight records indicate that Bering Air flight 455, a Cessna 208B Grand Caravan, was flying at around 3,400 feet when it stopped transmitting its location at 3:18 p.m. It was scheduled to arrive in Nome about 10 minutes later. Nine passengers and one pilot were on board the regularly-scheduled flight, officials say.

During a Friday news conference, Coast Guard Lt. Benjamin McIntyre-Coble said an “item of interest” had been discovered and was being checked out by search aircraft. Crucial information about the missing plane’s last moments airborne came from Civil Air Patrol radar data.

“Part of that radar analysis showed that at around 3:18 p.m. yesterday afternoon, this aircraft experienced some kind of event which caused them to experience a rapid loss in elevation and a rapid loss in speed,” he said.

Officials said they did not have information yet about what led to the plane’s sudden drop. Nome’s fire chief, Jim West Jr., had said in an interview Thursday night that the pilot planned to stay in a holding pattern over Cape Nome until the runway cleared. Then the plane disappeared.

At the time of the plane’s disappearance, the National Weather Service reported visibility of just one mile in Nome, with light snow falling. McIntyre-Cole described weather conditions in the area as “pretty challenging” Thursday, noting that they forced an Alaska Air National Guard helicopter to turn back that evening. Although weather had improved Friday, conditions remained cold.

“The air temperature in the vicinity of the last known position is about 3 degrees,” he said. “The sea temperature, depending on the status of the ice, is about 29 degrees..”

Coast Guardsmen and troopers declined to identify those aboard the plane, but said all of them were adults. Their families have been notified, according to the Nome Volunteer Fire Department. “Please keep families in your thoughts at this time,” said the department’s online update.

Clint Johnson, the National Transportation Safety Board’s Alaska chief, said numerous NTSB personnel were headed to Nome Friday.

“We have a pretty large response coming from Washington, D.C., from various locations in the air, in the neighborhood of nine people,” Johnson said.

No signs of the aircraft overnight

The U.S. Coast Guard is leading search efforts Friday morning, with support from troopers, the Alaska National Guard, the FBI and local volunteers. The Coast Guard reported that the plane was 12 miles offshore when its position was lost.The search by air Thursday night was mostly focused over the water and infrared imagery returned no strong indicators of the plane’s location. The plane has not sent any alerts via its emergency locator transmitter, according to the Nome Volunteer Fire Department.

The department said Friday morning that weather for the next 24 hours looked stable for continuing the search by air, and local rescue groups would continue searching by snowmachine. A base with supplies and fuel has been established 16 miles east of town.

West said that overnight aerial surveys found no signs of the aircraft. As of Friday morning, two Bering Air King Airs, a Black Hawk helicopter and a MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter were among the aircraft involved in the search. The Coast Guard was also planning to drop a buoy to track ice movement in the area, firefighters said.

All commercial Bering Air flights for Friday have been grounded.

Clint Johnson, the National Transportation Safety Board’s Alaska chief, said an investigator traveled to Nome on Friday morning, with a full team en route. The FBI’s Anchorage office said it also sent a team to provide “cellular analysis,” which firefighters said might help locate the flight through signals from the cellphones on board.

All families of passengers on the missing flight have been notified, the local fire department said. “Please keep families in your thoughts at this time,” said the department’s online update. Norton Sound Health Corporation announced Thursday evening it had set up a space for family members in its third floor conference room.

A representative from Bering Air confirmed the flight number, departure time and the time of the plane’s disappearance, but declined to say more. Bering Air, based in Nome, is a major regional air carrier serving 32 communities along Alaska’s northwest coast.

 Weather hampers early air search

National Weather Service meteorologist Jonathan Chriest said that the Nome area saw snowy conditions and visibility between 1 and 3 miles for most of Thursday. Conditions cleared slightly between 2 and 4 p.m, but after that, light freezing drizzle returned and transitioned back to snow later in the evening.

“There was a period of good visibility around 3 p.m., up to 10 miles,” Chriest said. “Then visibility later on in the afternoon diminished back down to near a mile, with a short period of visibility at half a mile.”

Overnight into Friday, volunteer crews from Nome and White Mountain searched by snowmachine for signs of the plane. Danielle Sem, a spokesperson for the Nome Volunteer Fire Department, said the initial effort was a ground-only search “because of the weather and icing.”

West said a Bering Air helicopter tried to search for the plane Thursday but turned around near Cape Nome, citing high winds and low visibility.

West said the city had provided a grader to plow 16 miles of road to the east of Nome for a staging area. While finding the plane is the first priority, he said windy weather and deep snow would make the work difficult.

“The next goal is, how do we get out there to get to them? Right? That’s going to be the challenge,” West said on Thursday night.

The search area includes the land east of Nome, where an occasional grove of willows breaks up the treeless tundra, and the Bering Sea just off the coast. Satellite imagery confirmed the presence of sea ice extending a half-mile from the shore.

‘It hits home for everyone’

Norton Sound Health Corporation announced Thursday evening it had set up a space for family members in its third floor conference room.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy and Alaska’s congressional delegation offered prayers for those aboard the missing plane via social media Friday.

“Rose and I are heartbroken by the disappearance of the Bering Air flight over Norton Sound,” Dunleavy said. “Our prayers are with the passengers, the pilot, and their loved ones during this difficult time.”

“Our prayers are with all those on the plane missing out of western Alaska, the Bering Air family, and the entire community of Nome,” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski.

Sen. Dan Sullivan said Friday morning that he had asked NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy to visit Alaska – “and to her credit, she’s doing that this weekend.”

“My team and I stand ready to assist the community of Nome and (Gov. Dunleavy) in any way we can,” said Rep. Nick Begich.

The state Senate held a moment of silence in Juneau to mark word of the missing plane. State Rep. Neal Foster, D-Nome, posted links to news updates about the search on his Facebook page.

“Many thanks for keeping those on board and their families in your prayers,” Foster said.

Sem praised the response from local volunteers, who turned out in force Thursday to search for the plane at night, in 10-degree temperatures.

“When something happens here in small communities, in the small region that we live in, it hits home for everybody,” Sem said. “Because if you don’t know them, somebody else knows them.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the time the plane was scheduled to land in Nome and its altitude when it stopped transmitting its location.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

Alaska Desk reporter Alena Naiden contributed reporting from Anchorage.

It’s been over a year since a landslide devastated the Wrangell community, killing six people. Last month, geologists presented their work from a visit to the slide over the summer.

Margaret Darrow, a professor of geological engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, has been studying the landslide with her colleagues. She said their research is still in the works, but they’re inching closer to answers.

“My greatest hope is that whatever we find from this work will be able to tell the community of Wrangell why this slide might have happened, where it happened, where other slides could happen, so that you could use it in community planning,” Darrow said.

So far, they’ve found that the slope held an unusual amount of loose material waiting to be set in motion – and that the muskegs on top of the ridge may have played a role in doing that.

A surprisingly large volume of loose material

Their soil and rock samples are still being processed, but so far the researchers can say that the soil where the landslide happened is unusually loose. It sits on top of glacial sediment, which acts like a barrier against water. That could have been a huge contributor to the slide.

Annette Patton, a geologist at Oregon State University, said there was a surprisingly large volume of the loose material.

“A lot of the hill slopes around Southeast Alaska have really thin soils because it’s just so steep and material can kind of slide right down,” she said. “But part of why this landslide was so large is because there was actually a very anomalously thick layer of very loose material.”

She said the team looked at records of old landslides in the area. They think the 2023 landslide — which took out about 200 trees — happened right below what they think was an older slide.

“We just wanted to show this as an example of the fact that there is a lot of movement and activity that’s happened on this hill slope since the last glacial maximum,” Patton said. “And there’s a lot that we don’t understand about exactly how that might play out.”

She said there was a large storm the day of the landslide of a type known as an atmospheric river, but it wasn’t out of the ordinary for Southeast Alaska.

“Something notable here is that it wasn’t a really extreme storm,” Patton said. “It had a return period of about one year. So it’s like a big winter storm, but the kind of storm that maybe happens at least once a year.”

But the rainfall monitoring was done only at the airport, 11 miles away from the landslide and at sea level. That monitoring system recorded a little over an inch of rain during the six hours before the slide. Some Wrangell residents said they recorded three inches of rain that day, closer to the slide.

“These are really common types of storms,” Patton said. “Most landslides are triggered by atmospheric rivers here in Southeast Alaska. But not all atmospheric rivers trigger landslides.”

But Patton said there was a lot of water on the slope — and it mobilized all of that loose material.

More than twice as big as any known Wrangell slide

Her colleague, Josh Roering, a professor at the University of Oregon, said that the U.S. Forest Service started paying attention to landslides in the 70s, and a lot of their research came out of Wrangell and Prince of Wales.

“You’re really in the epicenter of a lot of amazing discoveries that have continued to affect how we think about these processes that led to the Forest Service mapping landslides every year across the region,” he said. “The map for Wrangell includes 256 landslides.”

He said it’s helpful to look at all the surrounding landslides in order to contextualize the massive one from 2023.

“It was more than twice as big as the next biggest slide that’s happened on Wrangell,” he said. “This was truly an extreme, anomalous event in terms of size, compared to what has happened here before. So this really led us to ask the question, ‘What is so different about that setting that allowed it to behave so differently?’”

He said they were also able to use the LIDAR data from the State Division of Geological and Geophysical Science. The department surveyed the area months before the landslide happened. The department also surveyed the area after the slide.

Roering said the first thing they noticed was some large ledges, or steps, exposing the bedrock.

“These are really big steps,” he said. “Looking at it from the road does not prepare you for how big they are in person.”

He said the erosion wasn’t consistent throughout the slide — most of it happened at the steep bedrock steps. And they even found living blueberry bushes right below some of those cliffs.

Roering said that implies the slide came down and almost launched from one ledge down to the next — which would only be possible if the soil was liquefied. And that would take an enormous amount of water .

“This field work occurred in August of 2024 so about six, seven months ago, and it was still really, really wet,” he said. “It hadn’t rained in a while, weeks before we were there. Yet there’s still what we call seepage – a lot of drainage from the landscape above the scarp that was coming into this side.”

The muskegs on the ridgetop

Roering said they wanted to know where the water came from, so they used previous LIDAR data to find the path from the top of the ridge to the beginning of the slide.

“As we follow these flow paths, they go up another set of bedrock ledges, and then they get up on top of the ridge,” he said. “We spent a lot of time up here on this ridgetop muskeg, trying to imagine the plumbing system for how this works, how the water goes up and down, how it spills out in some places and not others.”

He said they put in hydrologic sensors that test water levels that will help them understand when and how much water gets channeled down from the ridgetop muskegs. The researchers will get the sensors 14 months after installing them. They’ll see if the water levels remain constant or fluctuate a lot during the time period.

Roering said the muskegs only form here in areas of flat land — not where the ridge is too steep. And they can hold a lot of water and channel it downhill.

“In some ways, having channels to take that water out is a good thing, but in a lot of cases, having channels funnel water to one location where there’s a lot of loose material is obviously a really bad thing,” he said.

Roering wrote in an email that the likelihood of another landslide happening in the same area is low because the scar left behind doesn’t have much material left to be mobilized.

The researchers also gave tips for recognizing when a landslide might be about to happen — like sudden changes in water flow or color. Another indicator would be sound — some have compared it to a falling jet or a tornado. The researchers said that once people hear a landslide, they only have moments to get out of the way.

They also encouraged people to pay attention to weather forecasts, as landslides usually happen during intense rainfall. People can report a landslide on Alaska Landslide Reporter, an app that the state of Alaska recently released.

Members of Juneau’s chapter of the International Association of Fire Fighters spoke out again about the lack of competitive wages leading to staffing shortages in Juneau.

Union members say firefighters are working mandatory overtime for pay that a recent study deemed below average. As contract negotiations with the city begin, first responders are asking the city for relief.

Dylan Hay testified at Monday’s Juneau Assembly meeting that after five years of firefighting in Juneau, the low wages have made the heavy workload unsustainable for him and his young family, so he’s moving to take a new job out of state.

“Not only has our call volume stretched us beyond a reasonable capacity, I’ve been on scene of multiple incidents where there was vastly inadequate staffing or volunteer response,” Hay said. “This leaves on-duty crews to shoulder a burden we are simply not adequately staffed to carry. And quite frankly, we are all tired.”

The majority of Juneau’s firefighters and EMTs are union members.

Logan Balstad is the chapter president. He said that none of the responses to the 18 structure fires in Juneau last year met the National Fire Protection Association’s standard for minimum number of staff responding.

“It is clear that our department struggles to assist the community on many small emergencies, let alone any of moderate to severe impact to the public,” he said.

Balstad said there simply aren’t enough firefighters to respond to emergencies. The department has been relying on mandatory overtime to staff response teams.

According to Juneau’s IAFF chapter, Capital City Fire/Rescue is down seven positions, and 20 emergency responders have resigned in the last few years.

And, Balstad said, the staffing issues are likely to get worse — multiple firefighters are planning to retire, resign or take a leave of absence to serve in the military.

But recent attempts to fill those positions haven’t been fruitful.

“In the past couple of years, we have had seven firefighter recruitment cycles where we had at best, one successful applicant,” he said. “In others, 14 job offers have been extended, yet none of [them] were accepted.”

According to a wage study released in December, starting salaries can be as low as $20 an hour for EMT positions in Juneau. Some starting positions are ranked in the 24th percentile for competitiveness in the Pacific Northwest. That means that if a firefighter applied to 100 jobs in the region, three-quarters of them would likely have higher salaries than the Juneau position.

The union and the city will begin contract negotiations this week, which they do every three years. This year, union members like Balstad say they hope it means Juneau will be able to offer salaries that attract more firefighters and keep current ones around.

Rachel Kelly is a family member of a firefighter in Juneau. She says she’s concerned about the long term impacts of the staffing shortages.

“We’re not putting more energy and effort into staffing that service, and so it’s the same people who are just doing more. And at some point that’s going to break,” she said. “To have so many fires back to back, like we have the last few months, and to have the response numbers on those fires be so low, it should be a really obvious red flag.”

And she’s worried this is further burdening responders who shoulder the physical and emotional load of Juneau’s emergencies.

Contract negotiations begin on Friday and will be finalized this summer.

A teenager was fatally shot at a roundabout in Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley early Monday morning. 

According to an updated news release from the Juneau Police Department, the shooting happened shortly after midnight. Later on Monday morning, police identified the victim as a 16-year-old boy and the shooter as a 24-year-old man. Their names have not been released to the public.  

“Both drivers appear to have been unknown to each other before this incident,” said Deputy Chief Krag Campbell. 

According to police, the 24-year-old told officers that he was followed by another vehicle while he was driving from the area near Safeway to the roundabout connecting Stephen Richards Memorial Drive and Mendenhall Loop Road. 

The man told police he drove around the roundabout multiple times before stopping. He said the teenager then pulled up alongside his vehicle. 

The man reported that the teenager was upset and yelling, and allegedly appeared to have a rifle in his hand. He told police the teenager then pointed the weapon at him. Then the man said he pulled out a pistol and fatally shot the teenager, who was pronounced dead at the scene. 

According to police, the teenager’s weapon was later identified as a pellet or BB-style rifle. 

Police say the shooter called 911 to report what happened and waited at the scene for police to arrive. After a preliminary investigation, police released him from custody. 

Police originally identified both the shooter and the victim as men.

Campbell said JPD will continue to investigate the incident. The information they gather will be forwarded to Juneau’s District Attorney’s office, who will determine if charges are warranted.

This story has been updated. 

For several years the U.S. Coast Guard’s emergency VHF radio system has experienced outages across Southeast and the Gulf of Alaska. There’s been progress fixing the problem, but some mariners’ distress calls are still falling through the cracks. So another entity has stepped in to help fill the communications void.

Some distress calls, like the one sent out from the F/V Defender in the Gulf of Alaska via VHF radio last May, are going unheard by the Coast Guard’s towers in various areas of the Gulf, specifically around Kodiak Island. That’s mainly due to harsh weather conditions, aging equipment and remote geographic areas where the communications infrastructure is set up.

And when there is an outage at one of the VHF towers, the Coast Guard typically doesn’t service those themselves. Tatitlek Federal Services Inc., or TFSI, a subsidiary of the Alaska Native Tatitlek Corporation headquartered in Anchorage, is the contractor that services the remote fixed facilities on Kodiak Island. A public affairs officer with Coast Guard District 17, Mike Salerno, said via email that Tatitlek has been the sustainment contractor since June 2022.

Since 2018, the Coast Guard has noted widespread VHF outages within its Rescue 21 Alaska system, which includes 33 sites equipped with radio towers that allow the Coast Guard to monitor and respond to emergency calls from boaters across Southeast Alaska, the Gulf and areas around Kodiak Island.

Gaps or recent degradation in the system can lead to potentially fatal incidents on the water.

“And until we started installing equipment, we didn’t necessarily know what calls were going unreceived or unmonitored,” said Bryan Hinderberger, chief technical officer for Marine Exchange of Alaska. “But we quickly started to realize that there were events occurring out there on the water that maybe the Coast Guard was not aware of.”

The Marine Exchange of Alaska, a nongovernmental agency based out of Juneau, has been acting as a 24/7 middle man between mariners and the Coast Guard across Alaska’s waters for multiple years. It has had a contract with the U.S. Coast Guard since 2006 for delivering Automatic Identification System Service data, but in 2022 transitioned from a concept to what Hinderberger described as “lifesaving action.”

The nonprofit is currently working to expand its coverage and add more marine safety sites around the Gulf of Alaska and Southeast.

“We started out targeting areas that we already knew the Coast Guard had deficiencies or experienced trouble in so that we could kind of fill the gaps, so to speak,” Hinderberger said. “We aren’t trying to replace Rescue 21. We’re trying to supplement it and provide some additional redundancy to it.”

Coast Guard officers agree that redundancy is a good policy, as they encourage mariners to always have a backup communication device like a cell phone or a EPIRB, in addition to a VHF radio onboard.

The Coast Guard gave an updated report to Congress detailing the status of its Rescue 21 Alaska system back in the summer of 2023, after addressing outages at roughly a third of its VHF towers in Southeast from a few years prior.
The Coast Guard Commandant at the time, Linda Fagan, who was recently relieved of her position, committed to upgrading the system to reduce its VHF tower outages. And since then, the Coast Guard says it has made progress on addressing these outages across Southeast.

Lieutenant Jake Carlton, the Chief of Security with Coast Guard District 17, which encompasses all of Alaska’s coastlines, told KMXT in a phone call on Jan. 28 that as of Dec. 31, 2024, the Rescue 21 Alaska network reported an operational availability or up-time of 97.2%.

 

While the outages are less common than they were several years ago, there are still some instances that VHF calls aren’t getting through to the Coast Guard.
Some of those gaps overlap with areas where the Marine Exchange maintains its own equipment around Kodiak Island, in places like Elbow Mountain, Pillar Mountain and McCord Mountain.

The organization also helps fill those gaps elsewhere on Alaska’s coastline with its own infrastructure, and it collects data from more than 60 marine safety sites, many of which can receive and transmit distress calls. Rescue 21 Alaska does not include VHF coverage in Western and Northern Alaska as the Coast Guard’s sites can’t receive distress calls north of Bristol Bay and the Aleutians.

Hinderberger said Marine Exchange’s equipment, which uses VOIP VHF for distress signal communications and still has a line of sight capability, is set up at higher elevations, and at sea level too, which makes it easier to maintain and prevents prolonged outages.

“We don’t just strictly install up on mountaintops, because we know mountaintops in Alaska are some of the harshest environments to operate and exist in,” he explained. “And it degrades equipment faster this time of the year, when the weather is far more harsh than in the summer.”

One incident when Marine Exchange heard a distress call that the Coast Guard did not receive via VHF was a search and rescue in Marmot Bay – north of the city of Kodiak – back in November. It ended positively after several attempts to contact the distressed boat. But Hinderberger said the result could have been much worse.

“Based on the fact that the Coast Guard went back the next day to locate the vessel and it was no longer present, (that) indicates that it either floated out to sea or sunk, is what we’re assuming to have happened,” he said. “And if those three mariners were unable to have been extracted from that event, it very likely would have ended far more tragically.”

Other examples include the Pan Viva in Unalaska in October of 2024 and the F/V Tanusha sinking near Kodiak earlier this month.

According to a proposed timeline from the Coast Guard, the agency plans to replace all of its Alaska Rescue 21 base station radios, spread across 33 remote sites, by the end of fiscal year 2026. The Coast Guard says this will significantly improve the system’s up-time and reduce outages by replacing the end-of-life radios with “internet protocol (IP) capable solution, which enables remote management and troubleshooting, and will result in increased operational availability and reduced downtime by allowing significant troubleshooting activities to occur without traveling to the remote site.”

Rumors have been circulating on social media that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents have detained tribal citizens in Juneau, but local officials say that is not true. 

City and Borough of Juneau Mayor Beth Weldon says some of the speculation is due to a miscommunication. 

“We as a collective, we – including the chief of police and the city attorney – we have not heard of anybody being detained or even questioned about their immigration status, for that matter, not to say that won’t change, but that’s what we know right now,” Weldon said. 

She said the city doesnʼt have information about ICE agents in town or anyone being detained by them.

Juneau Police Department Deputy Chief Krag Campbell said in an email that the department has received calls asking about ICE presence in Juneau, but they havenʼt received any reports of Juneau residents being detained. 

He said federal agencies not stationed in Juneau will usually notify the department when they are in Juneau. He asked residents to inform JPD if they encounter ICE officers in town.

Campbell says that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents are in town for drug enforcement support. That agency is separate from ICE, though both are under the Department of Homeland Security. 

These agents could have been mistaken for ICE officers. 

The Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska President Chalyee Éesh Richard Peterson issued a statement saying that there is no substantiated evidence that tribal citizens have been detained in Juneau. 

Nevertheless, Peterson encouraged tribal members to make sure their tribal IDs have not expired and to carry them when out in public.