A helicopter crew from Air Station Sitka medevaced a Tenakee Springs man on Monday after he sustained serious injuries falling off a ladder.

In an interview with KCAW, Air Station Sitka representative Herald Pereira said that the man was found in his cabin on Monday (3-16-26) after he fell off of a six foot ladder. Alaska State Troopers responded to the call. Pereira said the troopers reported the man was “dazed and confused” and it was unclear what had caused the fall. Troopers called for Coast Guard assistance around 1 p.m.  

After assessing weather conditions and gathering other necessary information, Air Station Sitka sent out a four-person helicopter crew to retrieve the man about an hour later.

In a follow-up interview with KCAW, Air Station Sitka Assistant Public Affairs Officer Chantz Black said that the man was discovered by a concerned neighbor, who guessed that he had been lying injured on the ground for roughly a day and a half. Black said that the helicopter crew arrived back at Sitka around 4:30pm Monday, and transferred the man to Mt. Edgecumbe Medical Center for further treatment. 

WEB ONLY: Editor’s Note: This story was updated on 3-20-26 to include new information about the rescue, and clarify that a neighbor initially found the individual, rather than a trooper, according to more recent Coast Guard accounts.

The Sitka Fire Department responded to a trash can fire in the Air Station Sitka kitchen early Wednesday morning (2-18-26).

In a press release, Fire Chief Craig Warren said that shortly after 1 a.m. the fire department was notified that the sprinkler system had activated in the U.S. Coast Guard base’s kitchen. 

By the time a firefighter arrived on the scene, the trash can fire was extinguished and Coast Guard personnel were ventilating the smoke and clearing water from the sprinkler activation. Warren said an investigation concluded that the fire was caused by the spontaneous combustion of oily rags in the trash can.

The United States Coast Guard and Sitka Search and Rescue is searching for two overdue mariners near Sitka on Tuesday (12-16-25).

In an email to KCAW, Sitka Police Department spokesperson Serena Wild said that police  received a call asking for a welfare check on the two missing boaters  around 7 p.m. Monday night.

In an interview with KCAW, Sitka Fire Department EMT Record Specialist Gus Mork said the two missing men, one in his 30s and the other in his 50s, were last seen on Friday, December 12 around 11 p.m. They took off in a 14 ft silver and blue Lund boat from Back Beach, planning to travel to a float house in Camp Coogan Bay, about five nautical miles southeast of Sitka.

As of 10:30 a.m. Tuesday, Mork said the Coast Guard was actively searching by helicopter and boat, along with Alaska State Troopers, and the Sitka Fire Department was preparing an emergency response vessel to transport an operator, three Search and Rescue members, and a search dog team to look for the missing mariners. 

KCAW reached out to the Coast Guard for more information on the search efforts, which were still ongoing as of press time. 

The Coast Guard Sector Southeast said on its Facebook page that “if anyone has any amplifying information regarding this incident, please contact the Coast Guard at 1-866-759-6061 or VHF channel 16.”

Editor’s Note: This is a developing story and may be updated

The U.S. Coast Guard rescued a pilot after his small plane crashed near Haines on Sunday (8-24-25). 

In an interview with KCAW, Chief Petty Officer Travis Magee said that around 8:30 a.m. the Coast Guard received a signal from the emergency locator transmitter of a two seat, single engine airplane over the Chilkat Range, approximately 35 miles south of Haines. 

“So the Coast Guard reached out to the Haines airport, who confirmed that there was an aircraft matching that description to the two seat, single engine airplane that had departed earlier that morning, but it had not returned,” said Magee.

Around 10:30 a.m. a 5-person helicopter crew from Air Station Sitka located the pilot and overturned aircraft near the Endicott River. Magee said the pilot walked away from the accident unscathed. 

“So we’re very thankful that this case resulted in the way that it did, with this individual having no reported back injuries,” said Magee.

The helicopter crew transported the pilot back to the Juneau airport. The pilot met with emergency medical services, but he did not request any assistance from them, and was released shortly afterwards.

This is a developing story and may be updated. 

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. 

UPDATE (1-12-24):
The Coast Guard has called off the search for a vessel that capsized near Sitka on January 9, pending more information. The boating accident claimed two lives, and the bodies of the deceased have not been recovered.

In a press release on January 12, the Coast Guard identified the three survivors. Tyson Ross, Justin Ipock and James Sturm were rescued by a helicopter crew from Air Station Sitka after their boat capsized around 20 miles north of Sitka near Chichagof Island. 

While the Coast Guard did not name the victims in the latest press release, memorial funds set up for the families have identified 18-year-old Sayer Tuzon and 18-year-old Darren Borbridge as the victims in the boating accident. 

On January 10, the Coast Guard and a Sitka Fire Department Dive Rescue Team located the bodies of Tuzon and Borbridge using an underwater drone, but Coast Guard spokesperson Shannon Kearney told KCAW that dive teams were initially unable to recover them. The Coast Guard Cutter Douglas Denman stayed alongside the boat until Wednesday night, when they were forced to seek safe harbor after weather conditions deteriorated. The cutter crew and a helicopter team returned to search the area Thursday and Friday, but were unable to relocate the vessel.

Link to support memorial expenses for Darren Borbridge

Link to support memorial expenses for Sayer Tuzon

Meal train for Justin Ipock and James Sturm

Meal train for the Borbridge Family

Justin Ipock Medical Funds

Medical funds for Jay Sturm

Initial Report (1-10-24):
Two people are confirmed dead following a boating mishap near Sitka Tuesday night. Three others survived.

A helicopter from Air Station Sitka responded to the scene of an overturned vessel at 5:15 p.m. Tuesday (1-9-23) near Chichagof Island, about 25 miles north of Sitka.

Three people were safely recovered from the water by about 5:50 p.m. The Coast Guard Cutters Douglas Denman and Kukui, along with an HC-130 aircraft from Air Station Kodiak also responded Tuesday night, tracked the vessel’s drift, and searched the surrounding area for two people who remained missing.

A Dive Rescue team from the Sitka Fire Department, along with a state trooper, arrived early Wednesday afternoon and deployed an unmanned underwater drone. The bodies of two deceased victims were found in the cabin of the vessel. Recovery operations will begin once on-scene conditions improve.

Initial weather in the area was reported at 8-10 knot winds, with 9-foot seas and below-freezing temperatures.

The three people recovered from the water were flown to awaiting Emergency Medical Personnel at the Sitka airport.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story referenced a press release that included an incorrect first name for one of the survivors. This story has been updated.

Two of the Coast Guard crew members who were involved in a helicopter crash in Southeast Alaska late Monday night were released from the hospital today (11-15-23). 

According to a Coast Guard press release, the other two crew members with severe injuries remain hospitalized in Washington state, but their conditions have improved. 

The crew from Air Station Sitka was on a search and rescue mission, responding to a fishing boat that was taking on water near Farragut Bay, about 20 miles northwest of Petersburg, when their helicopter crashed on Read Island. While Petersburg’s search and rescue team and coast guard crews responded to the downed helicopter, the Coast Guard Cutter Elderberry oversaw the dewatering of the fishing vessel Lydia Marie and escorted the boat back to Petersburg.  

The Coast Guard has not released the names of the crew members or any information on what may have caused the crash, though weather conditions at the time of the accident included reduced visibility in the area from rain and snow storms and up to 45 mile per hour winds. An investigation into the crash is ongoing. 

Read the initial report here

A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter crashed around 10:40 p.m. last night (Monday, 11-13-23) on Read Island in Farragut Bay, about 22 miles northwest of Petersburg. There were four crew members aboard, and all survived. 

Two personnel were severely injured in the crash. The other two received only minor injuries. 

The crew of the downed Jayhawk helicopter were on their way from Air Station Sitka to assist the Lydia Marie, a commercial crabbing vessel, which was taking on water near Farragut Bay.

Following the helicopter crash, U.S. Coast Guard cutters Elderberry and Douglas Denman responded to the flooding vessel. At the time of the initial response, the crew of the Lydia Marie had contained the flooding to a manageable level. 

Several agencies, including Petersburg Search and Rescue and EMS, came to assist the downed helicopter. Air Station Sitka sent another helicopter to take all four crewmembers to Petersburg Medical Center. They were later evacuated to Seattle for a higher level of care. 

District 17 spokesperson Petty Officer First Class Shannon Kearney says that the Coast Guard doesn’t have any preliminary information on the cause of the crash.

“We are working to launch a full investigation,” she said, “and any information that we get from the investigation, we’ll be forthcoming with.”

Petersburg Search and Rescue volunteers reported strong winds and snowfall in the area. According to the National Weather Service, there was reduced visibility across the area from rain and snow storms, and wind speeds reached up to 45 miles per hour.

Sitka’s municipal administrator, John Leach, is a former Coast Guard pilot. In a statement, he wrote, “Through the doors of Air Station Sitka walk the world’s finest aircrews, conquering some of the most formidable conditions on Earth to execute their duties and ensure our collective safety.  My sincere sympathy and unwavering support go out to all those affected by last night’s mishap.  They embody true heroism, and CBS stands in support of our community heroes.  Semper Paratus.”

Despite working in sometimes-extreme conditions, Coast Guard aviators have posted a strong safety record in Alaska. The last loss of an Air Station Sitka helicopter was thirteen years ago, during a routine flight off the coast of La Push, Washington. Three of the four crew on board died in the accident.

The Alaska Marine Highway System has too many old ships, and too few people to operate them. In a virtual open house Tuesday (10-24-23), ferry officials kicked off a 20-year plan for rebuilding and modernizing Alaska’s Marine Highway.

Marine director Craig Tornga summarized ongoing issues facing the state’s ferry system, including difficulty with crew recruitment and retention. 

“All summer long, we’ve had a few no-sail days across the fleet due to crew shortage just because we didn’t have enough personnel to meet the manning requirements of our certificate of inspection from the Coast Guard,” Tornga said. “So that continues to plague us.”

Aging vessels are another problem for the ferry system, which currently operates five vessels over 45 years old. In August, AMHS released an interim plan outlining capital and operations improvements through 2026. The plan includes building three new vessels, including one to replace the 59-year-old Tustumena and a hybrid or electric vessel to replace the Lituya. 

“These reliability issues are due to age, and they’re not going to improve for us until we build replacement vessels,” Tornga said.

Tornga said that the trajectory of the 60-year-old Matanuska is still in question.  

“Since I’ve joined, we’ve held meetings for the Coast Guard, and we don’t have a determination yet to the extent of the upgrades to retain SOLAS until we know the condition and the safety of the hull,” Tornga said.

Consultant Kristen Kissinger, who is working with AMHS on the long-range plan, emphasized that data and recommendations from communities will guide this stage of the planning process. 

“Really having a database of just all the information about what kinds of things are present in a community, what a community might need, what are the gaps, what’s missing, and what that means for how they use ferry service,” she said.

She pointed attendees of the open house to an online survey open through November 7 and encouraged them to attend an Alaska Marine Highway Operations Board meeting, as well as to submit written comments. 

Work to develop the long-range plan will continue through mid-2024, and ferry users are encouraged to share input throughout the process.

Whether in Sitka Sound or the Bering Sea, a beach cleanup is a major undertaking. So much debris washes ashore on Alaska’s coastline that collecting all of it would be impossible — but that doesn’t mean it’s not a problem worth trying to solve. Recently, the Ocean Conservancy and the Sitka Sound Science Center took an unusual group of people on a beach cleanup near Sitka to wrap their hands around some marine debris — and wrap their minds around what to do about it. 

The original destination for the cleanup is a cove on Biorka Island, outside of Sitka. But that beach has too much kelp for the boat to safely offload passengers, so the captain reroutes. To get off on the beach at the second destination, on the eastern side of Kruzof Island, means waiting an hour until the tide comes in. 

“I will say that it’s never gone exactly how I thought it would when I was doing the planning,” says Kristina Tirman, who coordinates the Arctic Marine Debris program for the Ocean Conservancy. She is all too familiar with the challenges of marine debris cleanup in Alaska. 

“It’s hard,” Tirman says. “It’s hard to do cleanups here, and it’s hard to get to the beaches that need the most help, because those beaches are often the ones that are the most exposed. So you can imagine that the reason that they’re covered in driftwood and garbage is because there are waves that are crashing, and all these other factors that, you know, lead to marine debris being there also lead to those beaches being difficult to access.”

After waiting for the tide to turn, the group of 40 – including volunteers, Coast Guard commanders, and congressional staffers from Senator Dan Sullivan’s office  – disembarks on the black sand beach. The scene looks a little like an Easter egg hunt, with debris seekers peering under rocks and behind tufts of beach grass for trash. One volunteer dislodges two mismatched shoes from an embankment, and another teases threads of neon nylon rope out from a tangle of roots. A third group has found the motherlode.

“Trawl web! Lots of plastic water bottles. And we found part of a Korean hagfish trap.”

Linda Behnken, who runs the Alaska Longline Fisherman’s Association in Sitka, helps to heave part of a brightly-colored fishing net out from under a driftwood log. It’s so heavy that a dozen people are enlisted to carry the pieces back to the boat. 

Tirman says this net, and much of the debris that washes up on Alaska shores, can be traced to sources many miles away.

“You know, we saw after the 2011 tsunami in Japan that a lot of tsunami debris came over this way,” Tirman says. “And so a lot of the debris just comes from all over.”

One of Alaska’s debris hotspots is around St. Paul Island, 1,300 miles from Sitka in the Bering Sea. Lauren Divine runs the Ecosystem Conservation Office for the Aleut Community of St. Paul. She’s here with her 18-month-old daughter Amelia, who is hunting for treasures in the sand. In  St. Paul, Divine says that debris has a major impact on the island’s fur seal population. 

“So what we get is packing bands, or pieces of trawl net or fishing line that are wrapped around the seals,” Divine says. “And it usually happens when they’re really young and they go into the water for the first time, or over their first winter. And then they try to swim through something, they get it stuck around their neck, and then they grow.”

In remote Alaska, the challenge doesn’t end when beaches are clean. Disposal is also a huge problem. She spent part of the summer working on repackaging debris from a previous cleanup. She says the sacks full of garbage sat out so long that the bags themselves started to degrade. 

“It’s like over 300 Super Sacks that have never been able to get backhauled,” Divine says. “So they were sitting out in the environment, and they basically grew back into the landscape and started degrading and putting the debris back out in the environment.”

Marine debris is not only dangerous for wildlife – it can also be a hazard to human health and safety. Shellfish in Sitka, which are an importance subsistence food, have been found to contain microplastics.  Ghost fishing, where abandoned fishing gear continues to catch and kill fish, is another side effect. Behnken says it can even be perilous to fishermen.

“Just last month, we had the one day king salmon opening one day,” Behnken says. “And we had a member who was starting off really well in the morning. He was catching kings and then he got tangled in a huge piece of trawl web. It took out two of his whole lines, and it was tangled in the stabilizer.”  

As they walk along the beach, researchers from the Ocean Conservancy are cataloging the types of debris with clipboards and pencils. Part of their goal is to collect data on what is washing up and where. That could help guide lawmakers to advocate for policies to help prevent marine debris from accumulating. 

Back at Sitka’s Crescent Harbor, volunteers load two full truckloads of debris, which will be sorted for recycling or hauled to the waste transfer station. With that, today’s cleanup is over, and one small piece of Alaska’s coastline is a little bit cleaner. Tirman says that even though there’s still work to do, building awareness of the problem –  by hosting cleanups, and by sharing photos and data from the events – is a big first step.

“I think a lot of people picture the Alaskan wilderness and ecosystems as being really, you know, clean and not impacted by garbage because our population is so low,” Tirman says. “But I think when people see photos of the beaches here, and just how impacted they are by marine debris, it’s really eye-opening.”