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Video shows CG helping victims of plane crash

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A video released Thursday shows survivors of the plane crash that killed former Sen. Ted Stevens being loaded into a Coast Guard cargo plane and treated during a flight to Anchorage.

The video, released by the Coast Guard under a Freedom of Information Act request made by the Associated Press, doesn't shed new light on the crash that killed Stevens and four others, but it is the only known imagery immediately after last month's crash in rural Alaska.

A preliminary National Transportation Safety Board report on the Aug. 9 crash did not identify a cause.

The 16-minute-long video shows three of the four survivors being loaded into the plane in Dillingham, Alaska, which was the largest city near the crash site. The other survivor was transported privately to Anchorage later, said Coast Guard Petty Officer David Mosley.

The original video, which was 25 minutes long, had been edited down to the current time.

It shows medical personnel administering IVs and cutting off bandages on survivors, who are not recognizable. It ends when the plane has landed in Anchorage and the survivors are being readied for transport to an Anchorage hospital.

The Coast Guard immediately processed the video, but since it was not the lead investigative agency, it submitted the video to the NTSB for release.

That agency ultimately decided not to release it, said Chief Petty Officer Dana Warr.

A spokesman for the NTSB could not comment before checking with investigators.

Warr said it was standard practice for the Coast Guard to videotape and shoot still images of its operations and make them public.

The footage was shot by Petty Officer Jonathan Lally, assigned to the Kodiak base, where the plane was launched. Personnel from the Alaska Air National Guard and Coast Guard were on the plane, making the survivors comfortable and treating them.

"This was their trip to continuing medical care so that was the significance of the flight," Mosley said.

The NTSB report said the plane left a corporate-owned lodge at around 2:30 p.m., and the wreckage was spotted on a remote southwest Alaska mountainside at about 8:05 p.m. It said the crash occurred at around 2:45 p.m.

Among the four people injured in the crash was former NASA chief Sean O'Keefe.