The Alaska commuter plane that disappeared last month before its wreck was discovered with all 10 onboard dead was more than 1,000 pounds overweight at the time of takeoff, according to details of a preliminary investigation released Wednesday.

Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board said in a new report that the fatal Bering Air Cessna flight was significantly overloaded for Alaska’s expected icy weather conditions on Feb. 6 which could have contributed to its rapid loss of altitude and ultimate demise that day.

“[T]he airplane’s estimated gross takeoff weight at departure was about 9,865 lbs, which was about 1,058 lbs over the maximum takeoff gross weight for flight into known or forecast icing conditions,” the preliminary report from the NTSB stated.

“It was also about 803 lbs over the maximum gross takeoff weight for any flight operation under the APE III flight manual supplement,” the report said.

The APE III is a payload extender that the doomed Textron Aviation plane was outfitted with, which increased the maximum gross takeoff weight for the aircraft.

Cargo and baggage on the flight weighed about 709 lbs.

NTSB said in its preliminary report that there were no significant meteorological weather advisories or warnings at the time of the crash. The full NTSB investigation will continue to examine all possible weather factors, the report stated.

The plane which was traveling between the communities of Unalakleet and Nome was also flown by an experienced pilot, according to the report.

Pilot Chan Antill, 34, held a commercial pilot certificate with ratings for single-engine and multi-engine land airplanes. He also had instrument privileges in planes, according to the report.

Before his death, he had accumulated about 2,500 hours of flight time.

Antill flew 58.4 hours in the 30 days preceding the accident and 4.4 hours in the week prior, according to the NTSB.

The Cessna Caravan flight was carrying Antill and his nine passengers when authorities lost all contact just an hour after takeoff and the plane seemingly vanished from the map.

The wreckage was found the following day, Feb. 7, on sea ice off Alaska’s coast.

It was the third major plane crash in the US in just over a week.

The official cause of the crash has not yet been determined as the NTSB is continuing its investigation.

A full and final report with the official cause will be released at a later date.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – There is concern among the weather community about the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) weather resources and whether they would remain intact if there were additional layoffs or service cuts within the National Weather Service (NWS).

Regardless of where weather forecasts come from, they all rely on data from the NOAA’s National Weather Service.

Meteorologists, including those at Alaska’s News Source, use observations from NWS weather stations, NOAA-provided satellites, radar, and global computer models to make daily forecasts. The NWS is also responsible for providing all lifesaving weather alerts when severe weather is forecasted.

Since January, nearly 25% of NOAA employees have been laid off.

Some federal employees have been “reinstated” following federal court orders, but remain on paid leave.

Some Alaska communities have already had services reduced.

The NWS announced last month that it would indefinitely suspend weather balloon launches in Kotzebue due to staffing shortages. Those launches collected critical data, including temperatures, humidity, and pressure.

The NWS declined an interview and was unable to provide the number of Alaska employees who had been terminated.

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In June 1942, Japan’s invasion of the Aleutian islands in Alaska prompted the U.S. military to activate the Alaska territorial guard, an Army reserve made up of volunteers who wanted to help protect the U.S. So many of the volunteers were from Alaska’s Indigenous peoples — Aleut, Inupiak, Yupik, Tlingit, and many others — that the guard was nicknamed the “Eskimo Scouts.” 

When World War II ended and the reserve force ceased operations in 1947, the U.S. approached the Indigenous Yupik people of Alaska with another ask: Could the Air Force set up “listening posts” on the island of Sivuqaq, also known as St. Lawrence Island, to help with the intelligence gathering needed to win the Cold War?  

Viola Waghiyi, who is Yupik from Sivuqaq, said the answer was a resounding yes. 

“Our grandfathers and fathers volunteered for the Alaska territorial guard,” she said. “We were very patriotic.” 

But that trust was abused, Waghiyi said. The U.S. military eventually abandoned its Air Force and Army bases, leaving the land polluted with toxic chemicals such as fuel, mercury, and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, that are known as “forever chemicals” because they persist so long in the environment. The contamination was largely due to spilled and leaking fuel from storage tanks and pipes, both above ground and below ground. More chemical waste came from electrical transformers, abandoned metals and 55-gallon drums. 

Now, Waghiyi is the environmental health and justice program director at the Alaska Community Action on Toxics, an organization dedicated to limiting the effects of toxic substances on Alaska’s residents and environment. Last week, the organization filed a complaint to the United Nations special rapporteur on toxics and human rights, in partnership with the U.C. Berkeley Environmental Law Clinic. 

Their complaint calls for the United Nations to investigate how military waste on Sivuqaq continues to violate the rights of the people who live there, such as the right to a clean and healthy environment and Indigenous peoples’ right to free, prior, and informed consent to what happens on their land. 

“By exposing the Yupik people of Sivuqaq to polluted drinking water sources, air, and soil, and by contaminating local native foods; by causing pervasive human exposure to hazardous chemicals through multiple routes; by toxifying the broader ecosystem; and by not cleaning up contamination sufficiently to protect human health and the environment, the U.S. Air Force and Army Corps of Engineers violated human rights long recognized in international law,” the complaint says. 

This submission from Alaska is part of a larger, global effort to raise awareness of military toxic waste by the United Nations. The U.N. special rapporteur on toxics and human rights is collecting public input on military activities and toxic waste until April 1. The information collected will be used in a report presented to the U.N. General Assembly in October. 

The two shuttered bases in Sivuqaq, Alaska, are now classified as “formerly used defense,” or FUD, sites, overseen by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and more than $130 million has been spent to remove the contamination. John Budnick, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska, said the cleanup is considered complete but that the agency is reviewing the site every five years “to ensure the selected remedies continue to be protective of human health and the environment.” 

“We have completed the work at Northeast Cape, but additional follow-up actions may result from the monitoring phase of the Formerly Used Defense Sites Program,” he said. The last site visit occurred last July and an updated review report is expected to be released this summer.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, similarly concluded in 2013 that an additional EPA cleanup wouldn’t significantly differ from what the Army Corps of Engineers is doing and declined to place the sites on the EPA’s list of hazardous waste cleanup priorities.

A 2022 study found that so far, federal cleanup efforts have been inadequate. “High levels of persistent organic pollutants and toxic metals continue to leach from the Northeast Cape FUD site despite large-scale remediation that occurred in the early 2000s,” the authors concluded. 

The persisting pollution has garnered the attention of Alaska’s state Dept. of Environmental Conservation which oversees the cleanup of contaminated sites. Stephanie Buss, contaminated sites program manager at the agency, said her office has asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do additional cleanup at Northeast Cape.

“These active contaminated sites have not met closure requirements,” she said. The second former base, Gambell, was classified as completed but still lacks land use controls, she noted. 

“DEC takes community health concerns seriously and will continue to provide oversight of the conditions at its active sites in accordance with the state’s regulatory framework to ensure an appropriate response that protects human health and welfare,” Buss said.

That same 2022 study found that 89 percent of the fish around the Northeast Cape base contained mercury exceeding the levels the EPA deemed appropriate for people who rely on subsistence fishing. “All fish sampled near the FUD site exceeded the EPA’s PCB guidelines for cancer risk for unrestricted human consumption,” the researchers further found. Waghiyi said the contamination displaced 130 people, and has left her friends and family with a lasting legacy of illness. 

“It’s not a matter of if we’ll get cancer, but when,” Waghiyi said. Her father died of cancer. Her mother had a stillborn child. Waghiyi herself is a cancer survivor and has had three miscarriages. 

“We feel that they have turned their back on us,” Waghiyi said of the U.S. military. “We wanted our lands to be turned back in the same condition when they turned over.” 

The U.S. military has a long history of contaminating lands and waters through military training and battles sites, including on Indigenous lands. Citizens of the Navajo Nation in Arizona and  Yakama Nation in Washington continue to raise concerns about the ongoing effects of military nuclear testing on their lands and health. In the Marshall Islands, fishing around certain atolls is discouraged due to high rates of toxicity due to nuclear testing and other military training. On Guam, chemicals from an active Air Force base have contaminated parts of the islandʻs sole-source aquifer that serves 70% of the population. Last year, a federal report found that climate change threatens to unearth even more U.S. military nuclear waste in both the Marshall Islands and Greenland. 

In 2021, the Navy in Hawaiʻi poisoned 90,000 people when jet fuel leached from aging, massive underground storage tanks into the drinking water supply after the Navy ignored years of warning to upgrade the tanks or remove the fuel. The federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to remove unexploded ordnance from the island of Kahoʻolawe, a former bombing range in Hawaiʻi, but the island is still considered dangerous to walk on because of the risk of more ordnance unearthing due to extensive erosion. 

The complaint filed last week by the Alaska Community Action on Toxics calls for the United Nations to write to U.S. federal and state agencies and call upon them to honor a 1951 agreement between the U.S. government and the Sivuqaq Yupik people that prohibited polluting the land. 

The agreement said that the Sivuqaq Tribes would allow the Air Force to construct surveillance sites to spy on the Soviet Union, but they had four conditions, including allowing Indigenous peoples to continue to hunt, fish and trap where desired and preventing outsiders from killing their game. Finally, the agreement said that “any refuse or garbage will not be dumped in streams or near the beach within the proposed area.” 

“The import of the agreement was clear: The military must not despoil the island; must protect the resources critical to Indigenous Yupik inhabitants’ sustenance; and must leave the island in the condition they found it, which ensured their health and well-being,” the Alaska Community Action on Toxics wrote in their complaint. 

“This is a burden we didn’t create,” Waghiyi said.