Search & Rescue

The Coast Guard Cutter Mellon pulled into Station Juneau Monday morning.

The 378-foot High Endurance cutter is based in Seattle.  Coast Guard Spokesman Kip Wadlow says the Mellow is in Southeast Alaska on a “shakedown cruise” to conduct equipment tests before heading back to homeport.

The ship will be open to the public from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesday.

She’s named after Andrew W. Mellon, who was 49th Secretary of the U.S. Treasury from 1921-1932.

Built in 1966, the Mellon has diesel and gas turbine engines, one of the first cutters to be built with a combined propulsion plant.

Juneau Police say alcohol may have been a factor in a boat collision Friday evening that sent a Juneau man to the hospital for treatment of serious injuries.

Police say they were notified through 911 by a caller who reported that a skiff was dragging someone through Gastineau Channel near Douglas Harbor.

Two Good Samaritan vessels were in the area. After the skiff was stopped, the crew of one vessel pulled the injured man from the water and the crew of another towed the skiff back to shore. The skiff operator was unresponsive and suffered severe facial injuries.

As KTOO reported on Monday, the 14-foot aluminum skiff operated by a 47-year old man apparently collided with a 24-foot cabin cruiser that was operated by a 91-year old man.

Investigators now say the still-unidentified 47-year old man was operating the skiff ‘on step’ just before the collision.

There were no injuries were reported among those on the 24-foot cabin cruiser.

The skiff was impounded and a search warrant was obtained for a sample of the man’s blood which will now be tested.

Update: Sept. 24, 2013 – 6:17 a.m.

The search for Alan Foster has been called off.

Original Story: Sept. 17, 2013 – 12:54 p.m.

The search is still underway for an Alaska pilot and small plane missing for the last eight days.

A single Civil Air Patrol aircraft started searching on Tuesday in an area north and west of Yakutat.

Five other CAP aircraft currently positioned in Cordova and an Alaska Air National Guard C-130 are taking a break for routine maintenance and crew rest.

“We’re also kind of waiting on the weather to clear up,” said Alaska National Guard spokesman Lt. Bernie Kale.

All of the aircraft are expected to return to the air on Wednesday.

Kale said there has been no discussion about suspending the search.

CAP aircraft have done grid searches while the C-130 has focused on high-altitude searches over steep terrain.

So, all the way to Whittier and then west of Yakutat. We have done searches from the last known point and we’ve spread out since then to cover a very wide area since there was no ELT or GPS coordinates of the aircraft.”

No physical objects have been found yet, but electronic signals were detected on Friday. Kale says the origin or location of the signals could not be determined by the C-130 crew.

47-year old Alan Foster of Eagle River and his single-engine Piper PA-32 disappeared on the afternoon of Sept. 9th after departing Yakutat. He was headed to Merrill Field in Anchorage.

Juneau Police are investigating a boating accident on Friday evening that sent one person to the hospital.

A 14-foot aluminum skiff operated by a 47-year old man apparently collided with a 24-foot cabin cruiser that was operated by a 91-year old man.

Capital City Fire and Rescue says they responded downtown for unconscious man brought into the Douglas Boat Harbor. It was determined that the man had significant trauma over his entire body. Patient was provided basic trauma life support care and transported to the hospital.

The age or identification of the injured man was not released, neither was the location of the accident divulged.

An Alaska Airlines jet with 64 people on board crashed on approach to Juneau International Airport Saturday morning.

Everyone on the plane survived and many ate lunch with the emergency responders who came to rescue them.

The fake crash was part of a live drill, involving airport officials, first responders, and nearly 75 volunteer victims.

*Warning: Some photos depict realistic and graphic fake injuries.

The walking wounded are everywhere inside the Civil Air Patrol hangar at Juneau International Airport. Injuries range from bruised foreheads, to bloody compound fractures of an arm or a leg, to completely severed limbs.

Fortunately, it’s only makeup, also known as “moulage.”

At about 8:30 a.m., Deputy Airport Manager Marc Cheatham calls for the victims to get ready.

“Everybody that’s moulaged, I need you out here,” Cheatham shouts. “We’re going to start loading up vans. We’re going to put you at the accident scene.”

The vans roll up to the Mendenhall Wetlands, just off the Airport Dike Trail near the float pond. The trail doubles as the airport’s Emergency Vehicle Access Road. In a real life event, first responders would use the narrow strip of gravel to access the scene.

A shipping container sits in the middle of the wetlands, simulating the airplane fuselage. The volunteers scatter around it, lying on the ground like victims of the crash.

Over at the airport terminal, it doesn’t take long for victims’ families to show up looking for information about their loved ones. They’re met by Red Cross volunteers, who assign them roles to play as part of the drill.

“You’re a victim’s family member from another country, and you have limited resources and you need help,” says one Red Cross volunteer.

A family assistance center is established at the Extended Stay Hotel across the street from the airport.

“They came in and we registered them,” says Ernie Mueller, a Red Cross disaster response specialist. “We had people from the Salvation Army to provide spiritual counseling. We had somebody from the Juneau Alliance for Mental Health to provide mental health services if they needed them. If they were hungry we had food. We had teddy bears for the kids. Whatever their needs are we’ll try to make it work.”

Mueller says the Red Cross has agreements with airlines and the National Transportation Safety Board to provide emergency assistance in the event of a plane crash anywhere in the country. He says it typically takes the group’s volunteers a couple hours to mobilize to a real disaster.

This is Mueller’s second time participating in a live drill at the airport, and he says it went much smoother than the previous run.

“There was a lot more information flow,” he says. “We knew what was going on. We had a passenger manifest. We had people who were designated as family and friends. It worked out really well.”

As the drill winds down the emergency crews, airport officials and volunteers gather back at the Civil Air Patrol hangar. Evaluators, who have been watching every aspect of the scenario, mingle with participants and discuss how to improve the response.

Fire Chief Rich Etheridge is an evaluator for Capital City Fire and Rescue paramedics and firefighters. While he sees a lot to like during the drill, Etheridge says there are always areas for improvement.

“You actually talk about these things in training,” says Etheridge. “But to put it hands on, you find out some of the communication links that we need to practice. Like, one of them was one of the medical officers reporting to the triage officer, and they could have been reporting to the incident commander. So, just trying to straighten out some of that chain of command stuff.”

The Federal Aviation Administration requires airports the size of Juneau’s to do a live emergency drill every three years. This is the first one for Deputy Airport Manager Cheatham, who says one area he’d like to improve is relaying information to the press.

“I’d like to be better at being a public relations person, especially with the media,” Cheatham says. “In the future we’re going to have some training for this. So, that’s one area that I can improve myself on.”

Cheatham says a full debrief of the drill won’t be done for about a week. In addition to a tri-annual live drill, the airport does annual table top exercises to practice emergency response.

Airport officials, emergency responders and volunteer victims will be acting out a fake airplane crash at Juneau International Airport on Saturday.

Deputy Airport Manager Marc Cheatham says the Federal Aviation Administration requires airports the size of Juneau’s to conduct a live emergency drill once every three years.

“So if we actually do have an accident here, one, we’re ready and prepared, and two, we can identify flaws through the drills to mitigate them if something really does happen,” Cheatham says.

This year’s scenario is the crash of an Alaska Airlines 737 south of the airport in the Mendenhall Wetlands. Cheatham says volunteer victims will de-plane a fake fuselage, and first responders will try to rescue them using the Emergency Vehicle Access Road, or Airport Dike Trail. Firefighters may also put out a small fire.

So, if you see emergency vehicles in and around the airport tomorrow, Cheatham says don’t panic.

“We are going to have signage out there letting people that come and go at the airport that there is a live drill here, and the general public, please don’t be alarmed,” he says.

The Emergency Vehicle Access Road will be closed for the drill starting at 6 p.m. Friday. It will reopen Saturday afternoon around 5:00.

Cheatham says the airport also holds annual table top emergency exercises in addition to the tri-annual live drill.