Search & Rescue

A Juneau man who was reported missing Saturday from Riverview Senior Living was found alive in the building’s attic on Monday.

Alaska State Trooper Luke Lemieux said Riverview staff found 58-year-old Nathan Wilder Bishop, who has Parkinson’s disease and dementia, in the attic around noon. Staff had gone to the attic to address a mechanical issue.

“I’m very happy,” Lemieux said Monday.

Lemieux said there wasn’t security footage to show how Bishop got to the attic, or whether he left the building at any point. Bishop is a resident at the facility. 

“He would have had to climb up a ladder and then open up a latch, or there’s two entrances from the roof,” Lemieux said. “We’re just happy that someone found him.”

Lemieux said Bishop appeared uninjured when staff found him.

Bishop was reported missing on Saturday. He’d last been seen at 5 p.m. that day. 

Authorities issued a Silver Alert for Bishop on Saturday. Lemieux said first responders started the search around 7 p.m. that night with the help of SEADOGS, a local team of search dogs. On Sunday, Juneau Mountain Rescue and 77 community volunteers searched the Mendenhall Valley, including the Nugget Mall area, Fritz Cove Road and University of Alaska Southeast campus.

On Monday, SEADOGS and Juneau Mountain Rescue focused on the Kaxdigoowu Héen Dei Brotherhood Bridge Trail until Bishop was located.

On Saturday, search and rescue teams in Wrangell recovered the body of a fourth victim from the debris of last week’s deadly landslide. Two people remain missing: Derek Heller, 12, and neighbor Otto Florschutz, 65.

Florschutz’s wife, Christina Florschutz, survived the slide and is recovering in Wrangell’s local hospital. She said she had just taken a shower upstairs in their home when the slide struck.

“And I heard this horrible noise, very loud noise and I recognized it — I’ve heard tornadoes, I’ve heard a mudslide before,” she said, speaking from her hospital bed Thursday. “I knew what was happening, but I didn’t have any warning. I heard the noise. And suddenly I’m like a piece of weightless popcorn being tossed around all over the places, slamming into things and everything.”

When she came to rest, Florschutz found herself under part of the house’s roof, but able to see trees. She was cold and suffering from leg cramps, but when she touched a plastic bag she realized what it contained: pieces of polar fleece she had collected from thrift stores for sewing projects.

“Right then and there, I knew I was going to live,” she said. “I was going to live; I was meant to live. God put that there for me so that I wouldn’t die from hypothermia.”

Florschutz said she was able to use a piece of polar fleece to protect her from the rain. She said that thinking about the third graders she works with as a teacher’s aide helped her survive.

Eventually, she heard thumping on the roof.

“I’m hollering out, ‘Hey, I’m over here,’ you know?” she said. “And bump-bump, bump-bump, bump-bump: I then realize, ‘Oh, it’s one of my dogs sitting up there wagging its tail.’”

She talked to the dog for a while and told it to bark if anyone approached, but by morning the dog was gone.

Eventually, Florschutz was able to wriggle free of the home’s wreckage. She said she used parts of the debris to cross the mud until rescuers spotted her.

“They got me to a place where I could walk a little ways, and they put me in this toasty warm truck,” she said. “That’s how I lived.”

After she heals from her injuries, Florschutz said, she can’t wait to get back to her students.

Listen to the full 42-minute interview with Christina Florschutz below:

Update: Nov. 27, 2023

Bishop was found alive and apparently uninjured in the building’s attic on Monday. Alaska State Troopers said it wasn’t clear how he got there.

Original story:

Juneau police have issued a silver alert for a man who was reported missing Saturday from Riverview Senior Living on Clinton Drive.

In a Sunday news release, police said Nathan Wilder Bishop, 58, has Parkinson’s disease and dementia and, if tired, could sit or lie down instead of asking for help.

The release described Bishop as a white male around six feet tall and 200 pounds. He wears glasses and could be wearing a brown t-shirt and grey pants, but no coat.

Bishop was last seen at 5 p.m. on Saturday. That night, first responders and volunteers searched the area where he went missing without finding him.

Anyone who wants to help with the search should check in at the command center in the senior living center’s parking lot.

Police are also asking people who live within two miles of the senior center to check their property and their surveillance cameras for any sign of Bishop.

If you have information about Bishop, please call the Juneau Police Department at (907) 586-0600.

Update, Nov. 26, 2023:

• 65-year-old Otto Florschutz
• 12-year-old Derek Heller

Original story:

The state Department of Public Safety has released the names of those killed in Monday night’s landslide near Wrangell.

The body of 16-year-old Mara Heller was recovered that night.  Her parents, 44-year-old Timothy Heller and 36-year-old Beth Heller, were recovered Tuesday.

Three Wrangell residents remain missing, including two more Heller siblings: 12-year-old Derek Heller and 11-year-old Kara Heller.

Otto Florschutz, 65, is also missing. Florschutz’s wife Christina Florschutz survived the slide and is recovering at the local hospital.

Next of kin have been notified.

Workers with the state Department of Transportation started to clear the landslide debris 11 miles south of town on Thursday. The slide, which is about 450 feet wide, came down across Zimovia Highway before it reached the water, destroying three homes and leaving about 75 without power. Many of the affected homes also lack phone and internet service.

DOT Spokesperson Shannon McCarthy says crews are removing debris from both sides of the slide.

“We’re working to restore the roadway,” she said. “That will allow people on the south side to get power again, and then also allow them to have emergency access.”

Search efforts have been ongoing since Monday night, with drones, helicopters, planes, K-9 teams and sonar.

State officials announced yesterday that teams have searched every place they can without the use of heavy machinery. The strategy is now moving from “an active search to a reactive one.”

“We have to move pretty deliberately because it is still a search and rescue situation,” McCarthy said. “We have a search dog team with their handler standing by so that we can stop should we, you know, need to resume rescue activities.”

McCarthy says the state is collaborating with local contractors to remove mud and downed trees from the roadway with heavy equipment. She says it’s a matter of days – not weeks – before they get a single lane of access across. And if they find evidence that anyone missing is in a specific area, an active search may be restarted.

The search for three people left missing by Monday’s landslide in Wrangell is now a reactive search rather than active search, Alaska State Troopers said Thursday. That means efforts to clear the roadway have started, but search and rescue teams will continue to look for people who may be buried in the mud as the clean-up progresses.

“While the active search is concluding, it remains a priority of the State of Alaska and your Alaska State Troopers to locate the three missing Alaskans so we can bring closure to their families and the community,” The Alaska Department of Public Safety wrote in a statement this afternoon.

Search and rescue crews have scanned all areas around the slide that are accessible without heavy machinery but did not find the missing people. Now, the goal is to create single lane road access so the power company can restore electricity for households south of the slide zone.

The names of the dead and missing will be made public on Friday.

Search teams have already recovered three dead — two adults and a child — and one survivor, a woman who was on the top floor of her hillside home when the slide came down late Monday night. She is currently receiving medical care, according to the Alaska Department of Public Safety.

But three people — an adult and two children — are still missing.

While Alaska State Troopers are leading the search efforts, the team also includes local Wrangell police and firefighters, along with state personnel from the Alaska Department of Transportation and the Department of Natural Resources.

Jeremy Zidek, public information officer for the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, said a state geologist made a helicopter flight over the slide site today to make sure it was stable enough for rescue teams.

“Everyday that landslide is changing,” Zidek said. “And when we’re sending crews out there we obviously want to do that work as quickly as possible, but we don’t want to add to the tragedy.”

Zidek also said a state emergency management expert is on the ground in Wrangell to help coordinate landslide response across state and local agencies.

At the slide site, search and rescue dogs will be searching atop the slide debris and from small boats along the shore where the slide ran off into the water.

“Every resource that the state has at its disposal, that is needed in a Wrangell, has been sent to Wrangell,” McDaniel said.

A massive landslide took out three homes on a highway outside of Wrangell late Monday. Three people were found dead as of Tuesday night, and search and rescue efforts continue for the three people who remain missing.

KTOO’s Anna Canny is in Wrangell. She says there’s a huge effort underway not only to search for the missing, but to evacuate or bring supplies to the many residents whose homes were cut off by the slide.

Listen:

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Anna Canny: So right now, we still don’t know any of those names that have been released publicly. But we do know that at least one minor and two adults have been found dead. One adult woman was rescued, and she was on the top floor of the house, a house on the upper part of the hillside, which helped her survive, and we’re hearing that she’s in good condition.

Meanwhile, the search and rescue efforts are continuing. And we know at different points throughout the day, there have been helicopters and drones doing aerial surveys, looking for those three missing people. There are folks in the slide area working through the mud and downed trees, crews with chainsaws out there, and there are search and rescue dogs on the ground, as well. And those crews were working all day yesterday and today. Community members have been delivering food out the highway to them to help those first responders.

But as of this afternoon, we still have no official word on those who are missing, though we do know that it’s believed to be one adult and two children. We’re told they won’t start clearing that road until those people are found. And then even after they start clearing, it’s not certain how long that will take. It’s a huge amount of debris that’s crossing this highway. And so for the time being, one of Wrangell’s main arteries is blocked off. And we’re hoping folks will be found in the coming days. But it has created a huge blockage here in Wrangell.

Wesley Early: How is that highway blockage disrupting things, if at all?

Anna Canny: Yeah, so the slide, as I mentioned, came down across this big highway called Zimovia Highway. And the layout of Wrangell is such that, there’s the town, where KSTK (radio) is, on the north end. And then there’s this long highway that snakes to the south along the bottom of these really, really steep slopes, which is where the slide came down. That highway is about 14 miles long. And this massive slide, which we’re now getting estimates is about 500 feet wide, came down somewhere past the eleventh mile. So now, obviously no one can drive out there.

And when the slide came down, it also took down power and took down landlines along the highway. As of today, some of that power has been restored from the town center, here on the north side, up to Mile 9 of the highway. But that means that there’s still a bunch of households on either side of the slide that don’t have power or phone lines.

We know Tlingit and Haida helped to set up some internet connections, so people are able to stay in touch to some extent. But now that area to the south of the slide is only accessible by boat. So there’s a bunch of households that are essentially cut off from the main town.

Wesley Early: Wow. How are the people on the road doing? What do we know about their status?

Anna Canny: So we know at least some households have evacuated. They either evacuated the night of — some people heard the slide coming down, got in contact with firefighters and got out by boat that night — and then there’s been ongoing evacuations throughout the course of the day, yesterday and today. There have been boats going back and forth between the town in the north and the cutoff area in the south. We know there’s one hotel here, the Stikine Inn, that’s hosting evacuees, and some of our reporters here talked to at least one evacuee today. And the innkeepers, they’re expecting more are coming in.

And then there are some families that are staying out there, sticking to their homes. And so there have been efforts to bring them supplies to keep them afloat out there since they can’t drive in or access the town without a boat. Water, food and fuel is a big one, because as I mentioned, the power’s out and those that did stay out there are running on generators. So it’s been an all hands on deck effort to deliver those supplies.

We know there was a boat manned by the city of Wrangell that went out several times today to drop off things. And then there are a bunch of independent boats. There are summer tourism boats that went out, fishing boats, I saw a gillnet boat out there today. And then I myself went out with the Forest Service crew on a fuel run this afternoon. They told me that all the local agencies here are pitching in what they can, and so the Forest Service, they had boats, and so they stepped up to use those boats. And as I mentioned, most of these are fuel deliveries. When I was out there today, we delivered about two dozen canisters of fuel that are going to be used to run those generators.

And a lot of donations are coming in to pay for that fuel. I’m told thousands of dollars of donations have come in so far. A bank here has set up an account specifically for that and communities from Ketchikan to Petersburg, and of course, folks here in Wrangell are sending money for those fuel supplies.

So, yeah, the Forest Service did one run yesterday and they plan to resume their daily rounds on Friday again, and between all of those agencies, they’re kind of keeping those households that are stranded out there well-stocked. But yeah, as I mentioned, it’s still a search and rescue effort, and efforts to clear the road have not started. We still don’t have a clear answer on when all that power will be restored. So for right now, all those families on the other side of the slide are stranded.