Search & Rescue

A witness who spoke with a tribal health executive before his helicopter went missing last month told federal investigators that the executive was “distracted, and was not himself,” according to a preliminary report published Tuesday.

Andy Teuber, the former president of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, was alone, flying a helicopter from Anchorage to Kodiak when he went missing last month — with his last reported location near a cluster of islands known for treacherous weather conditions.

It was the same day the Anchorage Daily News published a story in which Teuber’s former assistant accused him of sexual coercion and abuse.

The new report issued Tuesday, by the National Transportation Safety Board, said that Teuber contacted a pilot from a helicopter business he owned, Kodiak Helicopters, the day he went missing.

Teuber told the other pilot that “he needed the helicopter for the next few days, and he told him to cancel any previously scheduled charter flights,” according to the report.

“He added that he had brief contact with (Teuber) while unloading his personal gear from the helicopter, but that (Teuber) seemed distracted and was not himself,” the report said. “Just before departure, (Teuber) commented to the Kodiak Helicopters pilot that he wanted to be in Kodiak, and with his family, when a local news story involving him was scheduled to publish.”

Teuber has not been found, and until Tuesday, physical evidence from his helicopter was scant: U.S. Coast Guard searchers had seen, but not recovered, a float that was believed to have come off the missing aircraft.

But Tuesday’s report says that an air charter operator located more debris in the days after the accident.

“The debris was recovered and found to be parts of the helicopter’s float, landing skid, and fuselage structure,” the report said. “No other wreckage has been located at this time.”

A Coast Guard rescue team from Air Station Sitka medevaced a man with a broken leg last week.

Coast Guard watchstanders received a call from Alaska State Troopers around 9:30 a.m. on March 12 asking them to assist with a rescue operation in Cannery Cove, on the southeast side of Admiralty Island. The patient was a 69-year-old man who fell while hiking near his home.

Lt. Jonathan Orthman is a Jayhawk pilot for Air Station Sitka. He says good weather made the 42 mile trip take around 25 minutes.

“We got all set to fly out. The weather was actually really good for Sitka area for this time of year,” he said. “So we were able to go right over Baranof Island, straight over, almost direct line to the location that the state troopers had given us.”

https://twitter.com/USCGAlaska/status/1370534932628475905?s=20

Orthman says when they arrived, they couldn’t find a good place to land, so they hovered above the house, which was located on a hilltop in a heavily wooded area. The patient’s spouse had a VHF radio and was able to communicate with the helicopter crew directly.  They lowered a rescue swimmer and a crew member with advanced medical training to help prepare the patient for transport.

“It took them quite a while to get the patient kind of comfortable and set up,” he said. “It was kind of a tight area, so it was close to the home. We were doing our best, you know we have a very big helicopter. It makes a lot of wind and we don’t want to damage any property when we come in.”

Orthman says they moved the patient to a nearby picnic table, then hoisted the rescuers and the patient, one at a time. The man was then transported to Sitka for medical care. Orthman says five crew members participated in the rescue.

An Iditarod volunteer and two state wildlife troopers in Skwentna rescued an 8-year-old boy who fell through river ice at the Iditarod checkpoint on Tuesday.

“It happened really fast. I was glad I was at the right place at the right time,” said Doug Ramsey, an Iditarod volunteer from Sundance, Wyoming.

Ramsey wouldn’t have been at Skwentna, the first checkpoint of this year’s Iditarod, in a normal year. But a course change meant the race would come through twice about a week apart, so Ramsey was stationed there waiting for teams to return, killing time in the sleepy village of a couple dozen residents.

“I was walking down on the ice down there picking up some garbage and just looking around at the area. And two troopers came along on their snowmobiles. And they stopped and we’d been visiting a little bit and didn’t think too much about it,” he said.

Nearby, two local children were playing around on snow on top of the frozen-over confluence of the Skwentna River and a smaller creek. Suddenly, Ramsey heard a commotion.

“The older boy, he was saying ‘Help! Help! He’s in the water!’ And I turned around and all I could see was kind of the younger boy in the water and through the ice about from maybe his waist up. And so I immediately turned around and ran towards him,” he said.

As he approached the boys, he remembered instructions for rescuing people on ice from ice fishing back in Wyoming. He lay on the ice to distribute his weight and extended his arms toward the boy.

“I reached out and grabbed the back of his coat and started pulling him as much as I could up towards out of the hole up on the ice,” he said.

But lying on the ice, he couldn’t get enough leverage.

Meanwhile, the two wildlife troopers sprinted over to help.

“We realized it was kind of more of a serious situation,” said Wildlife Trooper Jason Knier.

Knier and his partner Dan Gunderson were lucky to be at the right place at the right time, too. They had been on a trail patrol mission on snowmachines when the trailer hitch of their snow machine broke, delaying their planned schedule. If it hadn’t been for that, they might have been back at the trooper station Wasilla.

When Knier got to the hole in the ice, he saw the boy slowly getting dragged farther under the ledge.

“He just kept disappearing underneath the ice as his legs kind of curled around the ice. The current kept dragging him downriver as he kept getting pulled, I guess you could say,” he said. He thinks he remembers the older brother yelling ‘I can’t keep holding him.’

Knier called out for the boy to hold out his hand.

“I was able to grab onto his one arm and just kind of yard him out of the water completely,” he said.

Knier said the boy was cold, but without them being there, he easily could have been sucked under the ice, and the day could have turned into a body recovery.

“He was definitely wet from his neck down. He was shivering quite vigorously,” he said.

Steve Childs, the boys’ grandfather and village postmaster, had a slightly different take after investigating the scene later in the day. He was told about the rescue later in the day after the boys had warmed up in a nearby cabin.

“It did look pretty impressive and everything until I stuck a stick in the water,” he said. His stick test showed the water to be knee-deep.

“When they pulled him out is how he got so wet and through the snow. It wasn’t quite in the river,” he said.

Still, he says, he’s thankful the troopers and the volunteers were there to help. And all of those involved agree that water safety in the winter is something to take seriously.

“They did learn to be even more careful in what they already were. And they did handle it quite well,” he said.

This story previously misstated the location of the incident. It was at the confluence of a smaller creek and the Skwentna River, not at the Skwentna and Yentna Rivers as previously stated.

In Chevak, two men are missing and a third of the community is without water and sewer. The events follow a fire that burned down the old Chevak school on March 8.

The men, both in their 20s, were discovered missing the same day as the fire.

“Both families on both sides have been looking all over,” Chevak Vice Mayor Ulrich Ulroan said.

Search and rescue volunteers organized a ground search.

“Searched all over, checked everyone’s houses, looked all over town, came up with nothing,” Ulroan said.

The men were in Chevak before the fire began, and there are no signs of either man having traveled recently. Chevak and nearby communities require permission from travelers to enter their communities during the pandemic. No communities received a travel request from either of them. It’s unknown if the men perished in the fire.

State fire marshals and state troopers are in Chevak investigating the fire and looking for the two missing men.

Also, following the fire, Ulroan said that a third of the community is without running water and sewage.

“One pipe was melted all the way through, and water was squirting out,” Ulroan said. “And they had to shut off the water.”

The fire damaged the suction in the sewer line as well, cutting off its ability to drain.

“The whole east end of Chevak has no water and sewer,” Ulroan said.

Ulroan and other residents in the eastern part of the village are packing water from the water treatment plant and dumping honey buckets.

“There’s a ditch in between the sewage lagoon and the solid waste dump where we’re supposed to dump our honey buckets,” he said.

Ulroan said that the city is working with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium to fix the pipes, and that the sewage line is expected to be restored before the water system.

The U.S. Coast Guard called off its search Wednesday for Alaska’s former top tribal health executive, Andy Teuber, a day after the helicopter he was piloting went missing near a windswept archipelago that pilots say is a notoriously tricky area to fly.

Teuber, 52, took off for Kodiak Island on Tuesday afternoon from downtown Anchorage’s Merrill Field. That was the same day the Anchorage Daily News published sexual abuse and coercion allegations by his former assistant, which appear to have prompted Teuber’s resignation last week from his $1.1 million-a-year job as president and chairman of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium.

On Wednesday, as a Coast Guard helicopter and cutter searched for Teuber’s helicopter near its last reported location in the Barren Islands, Alaskans who knew of his work in politics, health care and aviation were still trying to make sense of his disappearance.

Some speculated that Teuber could have intentionally crashed his helicopter, while others noted that the aircraft went missing in an area known as challenging for pilots.

“It creates its own weather. And it can creep up on you pretty fast,” said Tom Walters, a retired Kodiak helicopter pilot.

Teuber’s disappearance came after a swift fall from his position at ANTHC — one of Alaska’s largest businesses, with 3,500 employees and nearly $1 billion in annual revenue. He’d been president since 2008.

Teuber, who grew up in Kodiak, still held a separate chief executive job there at a regional tribal health care provider called the Kodiak Area Native Association. He’s also held positions on a number of nonprofit and other community boards, like the University of Alaska’s board of regents.

Last week, Teuber resigned his job at ANTHC along with his position on the University of Alaska board without giving an explanation.

Then, on Tuesday afternoon, the Daily News reported that Teuber’s resignation had come just after his former assistant, a 27-year-old Alaska Native woman, had accused him of forced sex and abusive behavior in a letter to ANTHC’s board of directors.

Teuber called the allegations against him false, and said he would never engage in a nonconsensual relationship with anyone.

Teuber told the Daily News that he’d recently been married, and he also listed his Anchorage home for sale this week, his real estate agent told news outlets Wednesday.

Teuber’s black and white Robinson R66 took off from Merrill Field around 2 p.m. Tuesday, according to the Coast Guard. Spokesperson Alexandria Preston said the aircraft’s last known location was two miles southeast of the Barren Islands, which lie about 25 miles off the southwest tip of the Kenai Peninsula.

Conditions around the time Teuber went missing were winds gusting to 21 miles and a temperature just below freezing, according to a nearby data buoy that National Weather Service officials said was the best source of information.

One of Teuber’s family members notified the Coast Guard that he was missing around 5 p.m. Tuesday, and the agency subsequently launched a 13-hour search that involved three helicopter crews, an HC-130 Hercules plane and a ship.

The crews spotted a yellow float that was consistent with a float that would have been found on Teuber’s helicopter, but they were unable to recover it and confirm that that was the case, said Preston.

The National Transportation Safety Board is now launching an investigation into Teuber’s disappearance and is assembling flight data and weather information, said Clint Johnson, the agency’s Alaska chief. It’s asking anyone who might have information about the weather in the area of the Barren Islands at the time to email witness@ntsb.gov.

ANTHC’s board, meanwhile, has launched its own investigation into the accusations against Teuber, which will be conducted by an “independent, outside investigator,” the organization said in a prepared statement Wednesday.

“Through the process of the investigation, this board is absolutely committed to ensuring a safe work environment for all ANTHC employees.” Bernice Kaigelak, who replaced Teuber as board chair last week, was quoted as saying. “Unfortunately, Alaska Native women are disproportionately impacted by violence. We will not tolerate misconduct or sexual harassment of any kind. We are moving forward.”

When the Scandies Rose sank on New Year’s Eve of 2019, fishermen from all over Alaska were shocked. Five of the crew, including the ship’s captain, Gary Cobban, perished after the ship rolled onto its side. Two crewmembers were rescued from a life raft by a Coast Guard helicopter crew.

Captain Cobban was seen as an expert who had been on fishing boats since his teens, and his boat was regarded by many as one of the most modern and well-maintained in the fleet.

This week, the Coast Guard convened a Marine Board investigation into the cause of the sinking. So far, expert witnesses have described serious problems with the boat’s stability report, which is a rating of how stable the vessel is and how much equipment it can bear. And those issues might extend to many other fishing boats around Alaska.

There may have been serious problems with the Scandies Rose’s stability report. In particular, the calculation of how much ice forms from freezing spray may have contributed to an inaccurate estimate of how many crab pots the boat could safely carry.

KMXT’s Dylan Simard has been following the hearing and spoke about it with Alaska Public Media’s Casey Grove.

LISTEN HERE:

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Dylan Simard: I suppose the most outstanding issue that’s come to light has been the equations marine architects use to make stability reports for the vessels, which are these functional report cards that tell you how safe the boat is relative to how much weight it can bear — how much equipment, how much crab pots. What kind of seas it can interact with safely, and how much ice it can bear before it has a serious weight problem.

The main problem stems from the way the weight of the ice is calculated. When a crab pot boat is moving along, there’s spray coming up from the sea. I’ve heard it described by one retired mariner as if, like magic, it instantly freezes on the mesh and steel frame structures of these crab pots. Over time, this ice builds up and it creates a lot of weight.

But there’s a problem with the way this weight has been calculated. Right now, the way weights are calculated for stability reports, is they take the long sides of the crab pot stack, which is all the pots together on the deck of the boat, and they just assume that ice is freezing on there, as well as maybe on the front and back sides, depending on whether or not they have any sort of shielding on them.

Now, the problem with this is that [pots are] three dimensional — it’s freezing all over these crab pots. So what they’re doing is they’re taking a surface area calculation of the amount of ice, when they should be doing a volume-based calculation.

This is compounded by the fact that there isn’t actually much information on how much these pots weigh. Some engineers have estimated it’s around 300 pounds. But there was one study that was commissioned by the board on the Polar Star, the Coast Guard heavy icebreaker that just went up to the Arctic. They ultimately found that over 2000 pounds of ice had accumulated on this crab pot, which is a lot more than the estimate of 300 pounds.

Casey Grove: That equation, that tells the captain and tells a company that owns the boat, how much they can load onto it, that might be flawed for a lot of other boats, it sounds like.

DS: I mean, if the math is wrong, it’s no telling how far this could extend. Now, plainly, sinkings are quite rare. This doesn’t mean boats are in a state of constant peril. But it could imply the safe bearing weights of these boats could actually be less than what’s currently being calculated.

CG: So, there may be some broad issues there — but it sounds like there might be some really specific problems specific to the Scandies Rose that have been identified as well, right?

DS: That is true. So, as of the testimony from today, the Coast Guard called on a witness. He was assigned the task of creating one of these stability reports for the Scandies Rose, and then comparing that stability report to the existing one the Scandies Rose’s captain would have had.

Now, there are a series of fairly remarkable differences between these reports. The Scandies Rose’s reports didn’t actually have down-flooding ports. These boats are powered by combustion engines, right? They have exhaust, and the exhaust port evidently is something that water could get in, and then get into the engine room. Which would cause a serious problem.

Now, in order for something like this to happen, you’d have to tilt the boat fairly substantially on its side — but if you have a stability report that doesn’t include the existence of these down-flooding ports, you could in theory, pretty seriously overestimate the amount of weight it can bear on one side, the amount of list it can have, before you’re in serious trouble.

CG: Maybe it’s too early to say, but has anybody, either testifying in the hearing or the mariners that you’ve spoken to, commented on what this might mean in the future for other crab boats?

DS: It’s fairly speculatory as of yet, but some of the naval architects who gave testimony for this said there absolutely should be investigation on the part of the Coast Guard particular to crab pots and how they would accumulate ice weight over time. So that when they ultimately make these stability reports, they can have accurate information.

And to further that goal actually, that is why the marine board commissioned that most recent, earlier mentioned experiment on the deck of the Polar Star — to try to make some determination. And that was specific to this hearing.