The Alaska Air National Guard medevaced three people from the Y-K Delta in the past two weeks. Most of the rescues occurred during extreme weather conditions, when many civilian medevacs and commercial airlines in the region have not been flying.
2021 ended with a month of stormy weather for the record books.
“This has been really an amazing December, with Bethel now having the second highest precipitation total in just about a century of weather observations,” said climate specialist Rick Thoman at the end of December 2021.
That weather stranded hundreds of people in Bethel, some for weeks, because commercial airlines could not fly them to the villages where they live.
The stormy weather carried into 2022. Because of it, the Alaska Air National Guard has had to step in to medevac patients out of Y-K Delta villages amid dangerous conditions.
At the end of December, the health clinic in Goodnews Bay asked the guard for help transporting a woman to Anchorage. She had fallen and injured herself. The guard deployed a helicopter and rescue aircraft to the village on Dec. 30, but the aircraft had to turn around due to “violently turbulent weather.”
Four days later, on Jan. 3, the guard issued a waiver to allow a helicopter to fly in the extreme conditions. It was able to arrive in Goodnews Bay and take the woman back to Bethel. There, the guard transferred her onto a plane that flew her to Anchorage.
Lt. Col. Christen Brewer with the Alaska Air National Guard said that extreme weather in Western Alaska delayed civilian and military responses to medevac requests, and that the Alaska Air National Guard responded as soon as the weather allowed.
The evening after the Goodnews Bay medevac, the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation asked the guard for help medevacing a man in distress in Tununak. The guard arrived in Tununak the following morning with a helicopter and rescue aircraft to transfer the man to Bethel, and then to Anchorage.
And about a week earlier, on Dec. 27, the guard medevaced a pregnant woman from Kipnuk to Anchorage. She had been injured in a snowmachine accident.