Helicopter crashes onto frozen reservoir in Idaho, killing 1 person and injuring another

One person died and another was injured when their helicopter crashed Thursday onto a frozen reservoir in southeast Idaho, authorities said.

Multiple agencies responded to the Ririe Reservoir east of Idaho Falls in the late afternoon, the Bonneville County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement.

First responders traveled to the site using snowmobiles and found two people inside the helicopter, it said. One was dead, and the other was taken to a hospital for treatment and expected to survive.

Deputies secured the area and notified the Federal Aviation Association and National Transportation Safety Board, the sheriff’s office said.

Deputies located a downed power line in the area, according to the sheriff’s office.

“There’s only one spot that a big power line goes across, and so whether that’s a factor in it [the crash] or not, we’re still trying to determine,” Sgt. Bryan Lovell of the Bonneville County Sheriff’s Office told KIFI-TV.

Officers closed the reservoir and the area around the crash site because of the downed power line and unstable ice conditions.

The cause of the crash was under investigation.

The incident in Idaho marked the latest in a string of recent aviation crashes in the U.S. On Wednesday, officials said two people died after two small planes collided in midair in Arizona, and two days before that, a Delta Air Lines plane flipped upside down while landing in Toronto. All the passengers survived.

On Jan. 31, a medical jet crash in Philadelphia killed seven people and two days before that, a midair collision between an Army helicopter and a commercial airplane in Washington, D.C. killed 67 people.