I’m walking along Katlian Bay Road, the one-lane gravel thoroughfare that weaves along a cliffside a few miles north of downtown Sitka. To one side there are sheer rock faces, and to the other, steep embankments leading directly down to the bay. My cell phone buzzes intermittently, going in and out of service.
It would be a challenging place for a search and rescue operation. But that’s exactly what is happening on this Wednesday in late April – well, sort of.
I spot Lieutenant Commander Jared Carbajal standing on the edge of a steep slope about a mile up the road. He’s watching intently as two men swing a floppy-bodied mannequin in a Coast Guard jumpsuit back and forth. With a final swing, they release the mannequin down the jagged hillside, where it tumbles before settling just above the waterline. They cheer.
Carbajal, along with Lieutenant Commander Mick Klakring, helped organize this Search and Rescue Exercise, or SAREX. It’s an annual event that brings together the US Coast Guard and Air Force, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and volunteers from regional search-and-rescue organizations to train with simulated disaster scenarios. The agenda for this week includes rescuing people from an ATV wreck on Kruzof Island and a plane crash in Nakwasina Bay. Today, Carbajal is preparing for a mass casualty scenario. He explains as we drive up the road, looking for spots to drop more mannequins.
“What we’re simulating is that it was a tour bus, and the bus got swept away in a landslide, and everybody’s stranded,” he says.
There will be 38 total victims scattered along the two miles of road. Five are mannequins, and the other 33 are Coast Guard volunteers. I meet two of them along the road, sipping from thermoses.
“We’re dehydrated, or hung over,” one says. “Yeah, hungover, dehydrated, all the same.”
The other lies down on the gravel, demonstrating. “I’ll lay out, and then I guess y’all will kind of just be like, ‘Hey, he’s dehydrated!'”
Back on the Sitka Coast Guard base, rescue crews are getting a pep talk from Commander Rand Semke before they head out.
“Why do we do this?” he asks to a room full of American and Canadian first responders. “I can think of at least three reasons. Number one, it truly is fun. It’s professionally satisfying to do SAREXes.”
It’s the first time in three years that the Canadian crews have participated in the SAREX. He tells them that he hopes they take advantage of the opportunity to learn from one another.
“We learn things that we would have never thought of from the Canadians,” he says. “We think we’re masters of all kinds of things in the search and rescue world, and then we hang out with our civilian counterparts from [Juneau Mountain Rescue] and Sitka [Search and Rescue]. We learn all kinds of new things.”
Abby Leatherman has been volunteering with Juneau Mountain Rescue for about five years. This is her first time participating in a SAREX.
“We’re kind of coming into it not knowing quite what to expect, and so we just bring, you know, all of the gear that we anticipate,” she says, standing in front of a table piled high with ropes, litters, and emergency medical equipment.
She says she’s excited to see how the other crews operate.
“I think it’s super valuable to do interagency work,” she says. “You get to know each other so that when the real mission comes up, we all know each other and trust each other.”
She’ll be riding in the Canadian CH-149 Cormorant helicopter, which towers over the MH-60 Jayhawks that the US team is using.
“I’ve never seen one quite this large, a Cormorant,” she says. “The ones we usually fly in are very, very small, just enough for, you know, two to four people. So, yeah, this is very different. I’ve never been able to stand up in a helicopter before.”
Adam Welsh is a search and rescue technician in the Canadian Royal Air Force. He’s also headed out in the Cormorant. Welsh says he’s excited to see how the US crew compares.
“In the brief conversations I had yesterday with some of the rescue swimmers, it sounds pretty similar, to be honest,” he says. “Definitely sounds like there’s a lot of crossover at the end of the day. I guess we’re all playing the same game of trying to help people out.”
Back on the Katlian Bay Road, Carbajal gets a radio message that crews are leaving the base. Volunteers take final sips from their thermoses and slide into position under fallen logs and in drainage ditches, ready with stories of broken legs and hypothermia. A Coast Guard cutter motors into view in the bay below, ready to relay radio communications. The whir of helicopters slowly gets louder.
The first helicopter lands, and a team pours out in high-visibility gear, tiny orange dots on the expanse of gravel. US Air Force Pararescueman Jason Hughes is one of the first on the scene. He directs rescuers to walk in opposite directions along the road – they don’t know how many people are out there.
As the team on foot sets out, radios buzz with messages from the cutter about survivors they can see from the bay. A US Jayhwawk helicopter hovers over an embankment, preparing to hoist the mannequin tossed down earlier. At one point, they even try to rescue me.
In about an hour, rescuers will get an alert saying that someone has activated an iPhone SOS signal from deep in the nearby woods, where a helicopter rescue might be more difficult.
Carbajal says that locating those survivors and deciding how to get them out of the woods will be an extra challenge.
“They have to pull out their GPS and use that GPS to go find them, you know, and then bring them out of the woods,” he says. “So just some different elements to it that we’re trying to train.”
Although today is a simulation, Carbajal says the stakes are real. He’s flown on missions where crews had to rely primarily on SOS signals to rescue survivors. He says it’s critical for crews to know how to use all the tools at their disposal – and how to make decisions when there isn’t a clear answer.
“We add a level of, like, decision making and realism to be like, hey, there’s not always going to be a perfect cleared-out landing site,” he says.
At the end of the day today, crews will gather to debrief – on how they performed, and how they can do better tomorrow.
