Alaska’s Army National Guard recently sent a Black Hawk helicopter fitted with a rescue hoist to a permanent station in Bethel. The goal is to speed up search and rescue operations in the region.
On Monday, Bethel’s emergency responders took a ride with a few pilots from the National Guard.
“This morning, we were flying some of the local firefighters and EMTs for familiarization of the area from the air,” said Chief Warrant Officer 2nd Class Morgan Osborn. The 29-year-old copilot from Anchorage is stationed at Bryant Army Airfield, but travels to Bethel to help out.
“We flew over the Kuskokwim checking for any kind of flooding in addition to flying the area that the Bethel Fire Department covers,” Osborn said.
The flight crew doesn’t have an Army medic or emergency medical technician, but they respond to search and rescue calls. So when they pick someone up in distress, they have to transport them to the nearest hospital or medical clinic.
“We typically will pick them up, bring them here to the hangar, and then the fire department and EMTs will bring an emergency vehicle to the flightline and we’ll transfer the patient from our helicopter to their vehicle,” Osborn said.
But that takes time, and when someone is severely injured or survives a crash, every second counts.
So, Bethel’s Fire Chief Darren Solesbee, another firefighter and two EMTs went for a ride to get get comfortable with the aircraft.
“Just because sometimes when we do have plane crashes in the region, they do ask us for medical personnel for EMTs, to respond with them,” Solesbee said.
This type of integration, teamwork and realistic cross training is really important in remote Alaska.
“We’ve done emergency operations training, simulations, if the Black Hawk crashed and how to shut down the fuel, shut down the engines and extricate the crew member,” Solesbee said. “But this is actually the first time our department’s done cross-training where we actually involved a real flight.”
The Bethel Fire Department response area is about 44 square miles. That’s a lot of ground to cover.
“So we went down just pass Oscarville, and then all the way up to around the top end of Church Slough, to Kwethluk area, and just yeah, just let everybody see what it looks like from the air because there’s not a lot of these guys have taken small planes to the villages or anything,” Solesbee said. “We only know what it’s like on the ground level. So when you’re up in the in the helicopter, you actually get to see how it’s all laid out. And it’s good familiarity training.”
These types of partnerships and training opportunities will be crucial as the region heads into river break up season.
