Lewis County Sheriff's Office Chief Criminal Deputy Gene Seiber describes the search effort to family and friends of the occupants of the missing Cessna late this afternoon at the Morton airport
By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
MORTON – The lone helicopter scanning the hills for a missing Chehalis-based Cessna in East Lewis County parked at 5 p.m. but search and rescue teams on the ground expected to stay out a couple more hours tonight.
Lewis County Sheriff’s Office Chief Criminal Deputy Gene Seiber was heading up the effort at Strom Field in Morton.
Seiber said this evening he’s pretty certain they’ve narrowed down the location to a three-mile area northeast of Morton.
“The problem is, we’ve had snow up there, several inches today,” Seiber said.
The twin-engine plane is white, and the weather is bad.
The Cessna 340, owned by the Chehalis-based Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute, left the Chehalis-Centralia AIrport this morning heading for Lewiston, Idaho.
The pilot reported to air traffic control one engine was down and they were headed back to Chehalis, but then radio contact was lost about 7:45 a.m., according to a spokesperson for the aviation division of Washington State Department of Transportation.
Pacific Cataract keeps a handful of planes at the Chehalis airport to fly surgeons to satellite clinics.
The pilot is Ken Sabin and the two passengers are Rod Rinta and Dr. Paul Shenk, according to Debbie Eldredge of Pacific Cataract.
At about noontime today, a sheriff’s office spokesperson reported a signal had been picked up in the Mossyrock area, but Seiber said he didn’t think it was what it first seemed.
They believe the twin-engine plane is about 10 miles northeast of Morton, based on information from the Federal Aviation Administration, where it was was when it lost radio contact and where loggers heard a plane engine this morning, he said.
It’s an area with extremely steep terrain, according to Seiber.
Dan Foster, of Farm and Forest Helicopters out of Napavine, was one of three men in the air in the air today. An expected Navy helicopter from Whidbey Island didn’t end up joining the search, he said.
“It was really windy and nasty up there,” Foster said. “Really windy.”
A group of 10 men – family and friends of the plane’s occupants Seiber said – arrived to the Morton airfield late this afternoon. An AMR ambulance with a paramedic was stationed there from about noon on, parked and waiting in the drizzle.
Seiber said about two dozen people have been traveling the back roads all day, scanning the area with binoculars. They include members of Packwood Search and Rescue, Lewis County ATV SAR and about 10 employees of West Fork Timber who were working in the area.
Seiber is in charge of incident command for the search and rescue volunteers. The aviation division of Washington State Department of Transportation was coordinating the air search.
At about 5:30 p.m., an employee of the aviation division arrived in Morton with a portable “direction finder” box.
“It’s more sensitive,” Seiber said. “We’re on our way back up there to see if we can get any signal.”
Foster said his team would return by 8 o’clock tomorrow morning to resume looking from the air.
Chief Criminal Deputy Gene Seiber is based at the airport in Morton this afternoon coordinating the search for the missing Chehalis-based Cessna
Tags: By Sharyn L. Decker, news reporter