It’s been a very busy couple of weeks for Coast Guard rescue crews in Cold Bay. On Tuesday, they conducted their fifth medevac of crewmen from floating processors in the Bering Sea.
The Tuesday hoist was a return visit to the 680-foot Ocean Phoenix, which was 85 miles northwest of Cold Bay. A man in his late 20s suffered a severe injury to his left hand, and a Coast Guard duty flight surgeon concurred with the ship’s skipper that he needed to be medevac’d. The unidentified young man was transported back to Cold Bay where he was met by a Life Flight and brought to Providence Alaska Medical Center in Anchorage. Weather at the time of the rescue included 35-knot winds and 10-foot seas.
Adam de Rocher, a search and rescue coordinator at the Coast Guard 17th District command center, said the MH-60 Jayhawk crew that conducted the recent medevacs is deployed to Cold Bay from Air Station Kodiak for just such incidents in the winter Bering Sea and Aleutian Island fisheries.
Jay Barrett is the news director at KMXT in Kodiak.
