Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  In fact, the CO of the station didn’t recognize his old boss and demanded to see Larrabee’s ID before letting him enter the building. A Coke machine was then pushed in front of the main door to block any further entry.

  “After the towers fell, thousands of people were running toward our building,” Brandon Brewer recalls. “It was like we were in a bowl of soup with all the ash and debris. A couple of people were trying to get into the parking lot, trying to come over the barbed wire. We gave first aid to one guy who cut his hand doing that. Someone else tried to break the glass on our front door, and they were yelling at the security guard to let them in. On the river side, people crowded the seawall, and one guy tried to climb around our fencepost and fell in the water and was rescued by an NYPD boat. It was a mad rush of terrified people, and they just kept adding up ’cause the [outbound] ferries had been taken out of service.”

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  t was around this time that the Coast Guard’s Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) New York put out a call on the marine radio for all available boats in the harbor to go to Battery Park and begin evacuating people.

  A few minutes later, Public Affairs Officer Jim McGranachan, who was inside the building, turned his chair toward the harbor-facing windows. “I felt like that German general in that D-day movie The Longest Day, because suddenly through the fog, through the smoke, appear all these boats: ferries and tugboats and Circle Line [sightseeing] boats, all coming toward us.”

  Dozens of boats, including a Coast Guard buoy tender, began nosing up to the seawall in what would become one of the largest waterborne evacuations in history, larger than the British evacuation at Dunkirk, with more than half a million people taken off Manhattan Island (while tens of thousands of others fled across the Brooklyn Bridge).

  As the tugs, fast ferries, police launches, fireboats, and other working and recreational watercraft pulled up to the foot of Manhattan, their crews would hang handmade signs on their railings saying where they were headed—to Sandy Hook or Hoboken, Brooklyn or Staten Island. Teams of Coast Guard inspectors, cops, and firemen ashore started organizing the crowds into boarding lines and helping them over the seawall. Just offshore aboard the pilot boat New York and harbor tug Hawser, other Coast Guard personnel were directing the growing boat traffic through the smoke.

  With visibility around five feet due to the ash cloud, and stories of new attacks both real (a hijacked plane down in Pennsylvania) and rumored (a car bombing at the State Department), the crowds remained anxious to get off the island. Still, tugboat captain Gordon Young told WorkBoat magazine of one passenger who, when informed they were headed to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, complained that he needed to get to Staten Island. “I couldn’t believe it. I told him, ‘Get the fuck on here now, anyplace is better then here!’ Then he jumped right on.”

  Brian Walsh, a mate aboard the Staten Island Ferry Samuel I. Newhouse, told the magazine that once on the water the survivors were generally subdued. “They were mostly sitting in circles, holding hands and praying or crying . . . We kept telling them over and over again that it’s going to be okay, you’re safe.” By this point more than twenty-seven hundred Americans, mostly civilians, had died in the attacks.

  “The evacuations went on all morning, and eventually by around three in the afternoon downtown was emptying. We ventured out to look around, and it was a ghost town,” Brandon Brewer recalls. “In a few hours it had gone from more packed then I’d ever [seen] to more empty than I’d ever seen. A fire department boat dropped off supplies on our pier for the rescue workers, and we loaded some vans with food and water and went up to Ground Zero, and just seeing the destruction was pretty overwhelming. There were still these other big buildings on fire and collapsing and firefighters working to fight those fires. You’d pick up something—a notebook or photograph—and realize it was something personal, something you’d have on your desk or in your cubicle, and now it was just this pile of debris. I saw the landing gear from one of the planes on the street, and that was weird—all around it looked like snow had fallen, and everything seemed just somehow off.”

  “As a photographer the hardest part for me was seeing pictures of children and family pictures you’d pick up in the rubble, and they were everywhere, with the edges blown away,” recalls Coast Guard photojournalist Tom Sperduto, who spent two months documenting Ground Zero. “I saw a fireman pick up a picture and look at it, and I snapped that. It wasn’t my best picture, but it’s the one I always come back to.”

  Station Battery Park (along with North Cove Marina) soon became an emergency staging area with its conference room covered in sleeping cops, FBI agents, and exhausted Coasties unwilling to go home. Admiral Bennis, ignoring his terminal illness, began working twenty-hour days and telling friends that maybe this was what he’d been spared for. Bennis would eventually pass away on August 3, 2003, at the age of fifty-three.

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  he Coast Guard’s Atlantic Strike Team from Fort Dix, New Jersey, which specializes in environmental response, was quickly mobilized on the day of the attacks, followed by elements of the Gulf Strike Team. They were the first unit to establish a mobile Incident Command Post (on the back of a tractor-trailer truck) and begin monitoring air quality and worker safety at Ground Zero on the night of the eleventh as ground fires still raged. Unfortunately, within days, responsibility for hazardous-materials-related issues at “the Pile” was handed over from the Coast Guard Captain of the Port to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

  The result was EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman going on TV assuring the public that the air quality in lower Manhattan was fine (a declaration encouraged by the White House), even as the Coast Guard Strike Team was monitoring a witches’ brew of airborne toxins and dangerous elements at Ground Zero including asbestos, PCBs, compressed gases, chlorinated compounds, hydrogen cyanide, mercury, lead, blood, and human remains that they occasionally stumbled over.

  Although the Coast Guard required its own people to wear respirators, goggles, and hearing protection while searching abandoned buildings or working at Ground Zero and Fresh Kills Landfill, where debris was being moved, and also required them to go through decontamination afterward, it did not have the authority to order others to do the same.

  “Whenever I was with the Strike Team we had to wear masks. You thought of it as an annoyance at the time, but they knew what they were doing,” says photographer Tom Sperduto, who still suffers from reduced lung capacity resulting from his time at the Pile.

  Chief Warrant Officer Leo Deon described his frustration to professor and reservist Pete Capelotti, author of the Coast Guard’s internal book on 9/11, Rogue Wave. Deon set up hazmat washing stations at Ground Zero, but “we could not mandate that these rescue workers, whose shifts had just concluded, go through and decontaminate. We were not allowed to even use the word ‘decontaminate,’ which is the proper term for a site of this nature . . . Through some entrepreneurship, we were able to entice people to the wash stations, with cold drinks, with rehab areas where they could actually sit down, and through this aggressive approach a visit to the wash station eventually caught on.”

  Years later, thousands of people, including firemen, police officers, and rescue and recovery workers, are still suffering and dying from respiratory illnesses associated with exposure to hazardous materials generated by the 9/11 attacks that the government failed to address at the time.

  A few weeks after the attacks, the strike team would be called down to Washington, DC, to respond to the release of “weaponized” anthrax in the Capitol Building, an act of domestic terror the FBI would, seven years later, attribute to an Army scientist who committed suicide while under investigation. The strike team would return once more in February 2004 when ricin, a lethal toxin, was discovered in the Dirksen Senate Office Building.

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  n the days, weeks, and months after 9/11, Coast Guard cutters and small boats would work around the clock doing security patrols, boarding ships as the har
bor was reopened, guarding the Indian Point nuclear power plant, the Statue of Liberty, and other potential targets, and transporting emergency workers and supplies. Some of the small-boat operators would put the equivalent of twenty-two years of service on their craft. Nearly 50 percent of the service’s 7,500 reservists would be mobilized (by the beginning of the Iraq war that figure would rise to 70 percent). Port security would grow from 2 percent to 58 percent of Coast Guard activity before gradually scaling back to around 25 percent.

  The Coast Guard, which had seen years of cutbacks in funding and personnel during the 1990s and was facing an additional 10 percent cut in its 2002 budget, was hard-pressed to adjust to the new reality of post-9/11 America, of guarding and protecting ninety-five thousand miles of coastline and over three hundred major ports. As it began to respond, it also began to transform into a more militant, surveillance- and intelligence-oriented organization. “We regained what we’d lost in more specialized capabilities” is how Vice Commandant Vivien Crea explains it.

  “It was a busy year. All we were doing morning, noon, and night was 9/11 and homeland security work,” Brandon Brewer recalls.

  The Other City by the Bay

  I began to see the Coast Guard’s transformation six months after the attacks when I set off from Yerba Buena Island on San Francisco Bay on a 41-foot utility boat almost as old as its blue-eyed, thirty-year-old coxswain, Chuck Ashmore. I was writing a port security story for Popular Science, while Chuck was waiting to have a Vietnam-era M-60 7.62 mm machine gun delivered to the boat as he and his crew carried out daily security patrols past the new waterside ballpark, the bridges, and the airports.

  On the eastern side of the bay, among the brick buildings and quays of Coast Guard Island, a wooden-beamed theater hall had been partitioned into work cubicles for the new Sea Marshal escort program. Here more than twenty people, including marshals in blue jumpsuits, reported to Cdr. Jeff Saine. Until he’d been mobilized six months earlier, the stout, balding reservist had worked as a Safeway supermarket manager in Chico, California. Now he oversaw armed boarding teams that escorted about one-third of the large vessels, including oil tankers and cruise ships, transiting the bay. “We’ll put people on the [ship’s] bridge from twelve miles out at sea to the ports of Stockton and Sacramento,” he explained.

  Before 9/11, incoming ships had to give the Coast Guard twenty-four hours’ notice of their arrival. This had been extended to ninety-six hours, with more information required on their cargoes and crews. That information was being sent to the newly established National Vessel Movement Center in West Virginia; from there it was e-mailed back to local users like Saine who could evaluate which ships to target for boardings.

  Meanwhile, Special Forces troops had found a mariner’s license in a cave in Afghanistan. As a result, Coast Guard Investigative Service personnel were reviewing some 270,000 merchant mariner documents by hand to see if they could identify anyone with links to terrorism and compare those names to the crew lists provided to West Virginia. They identified seven names and also managed to track down hundreds of salty criminals the Coast Guard had previously licensed, ranging from deadbeat dads to a couple of homicide suspects. To meet the demands for this paper chase, dubbed Operation Drydock, CGIS had to call up sixty reservists.

  Other reservists from Port Security Units (PSUs) continued to patrol key U.S. harbors in their machine-gun-mounted Boston Whalers while the Coast Guard trained thirteen SWAT-like Maritime Safety and Security Teams (MSSTs) as required by the newly enacted Maritime Transportation Security Act of 2002. Beginning in 2003 in Seattle, MSSTs (pronounced “Mists”) would patrol America’s ports and harbors in matched pairs of 25-foot Defender class law enforcement boats, hundreds of which were now placed on order. Older technologies were also being adapted to meet the Coast Guard’s new security demands.

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  erba Buena is a pine-, lupine-, and eucalyptus-covered island that divides the two sections of the Bay Bridge. At the top of the island, in a prefab metal structure beneath a field of microwave and radar antennas, is San Francisco’s Vessel Traffic System. Established in the 1970s following the collision of two oil tankers below the bridge that released close to a million gallons of oil, VTS is the functional equivalent of an air traffic control tower with computer and video terminals manned twenty-four hours a day tracking some 350 to 400 ship transits on the bay and under the Golden Gate Bridge, considered a prime terrorist target after 9/11.

  VTS operators were, by the turn of the twenty-first century, using digital chart overlays of radar video imagery to track vessels that were color-coded (onscreen) by their type and size. If any ship attracted a controller’s interest, he or she could then pull up a database describing what vessels had come into the bay since 1990.

  “Prior to that we had to write all the information on index cards,” VTS operations officer Lt. Dawn Black explained, as she showed me one of their other capabilities—panning and zooming powerful video cameras located around the bay looking into, among other places, the inner harbor of the Port of Oakland, America’s fourth busiest container port.

  “Container ships are not always punctual, so this way we can keep an eye on what they’re doing,” she noted dryly. She became more enthusiastic as she described plans for Automated Information Systems, or AIS. Under rules adopted by the International Maritime Organization, a UN agency responsible for maritime law, by 2010 the vast majority of oceangoing commercial vessels (over three hundred tons) would be equipped with transponders that broadcast real-time information about their identities and activities. The United States was pushing hard for quicker implementation of AIS as part of its new homeland (homewaters?) strategy.

  After visiting VTS, I hit the docks of San Francisco with the U.S. Customs Service, which had been given security oversight for millions of shipping containers arriving in the United States each year. On an aging pier, Customs inspector Steve Baxter took me aboard a truck-mounted machine with a cherry-picker arm that shot gamma rays through selected containers, giving its operator a medical-film-like image of the contents, displaying shapes and densities. A container that was supposed to be filled with empty wooden pallets showed a dense field above them. They broke into it and found that sheets of plywood had been piled, unreported, on top of the pallets. The Customs inspectors next took battery drills and began boring holes in the plywood, looking for hidden compartments that might contain other dense materials like drugs or explosives.

  “Without this machine, that’s our main technology,” Baxter said, pointing to a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters and a pry bar lying on the ground. Today, despite overseas inspectors and improved intelligence, container security, like port security as a whole, remains problematic.

  My own suspicion is that as long as America remains at the vortex of a continuously expanding consumer-based trade, in which unneeded amenities like bottled water are shipped in from France, Italy, and Fiji, our port operations will remain, by dint of scale, vulnerable to disruption from pollution, weather, sabotage, or terror.

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  n 2007, I returned to the Coast Guard station on Yerba Buena to find that AIS had been implemented several years ahead of schedule and that vessel traffic management was now a key element in U.S. port security efforts. The island also had a new Sector Command Center down by the boat basin linked to the Vessel Traffic System up on the hill.

  Com Center duty officer Lt. JG Neptwim Rosario points to a large wall-mounted monitor with a live AIS feed of ships that appear as circles, squares, and triangles on a map of the bay. “The AIS gives us the name of the vessel, ID number and call sign, what type of vessel it is, its tonnage, crew size, flag country, location, course, and speed,” he explains. “The ferries also broadcast their capacity or their actual number of passengers. Any ship [over three hundred tons] without AIS gets our attention. If you don’t have it functioning, you will be ordered to repair or replace it by the next port.”

  We wind our way up the hill, past some
of the island’s feral cats that have been neutered and microchipped and a foraging raccoon that wouldn’t put up with that kind of nonsense.

  Since I was last in VTS, they’ve opened up the windows to let the sun shine in and installed newer flat-screen monitors. There’s also a fifty-inch plasma screen over the supervisor’s desk that displays a “transview” of AIS feeds from major ports around the nation, broadcast in real time from the Coast Guard’s R&D Center in Groton, Connecticut. Every port authority can now receive these AIS signals from its region. With a wireless laptop or handheld device a fishing boat captain or recreational sailor can also get a better sense of the commercial traffic in the vicinity and hopefully avoid being run over by a seagoing behemoth. At the same time, these civilian boaters are being encouraged to participate in the Coast Guard’s America’s Waterway Watch program, reporting any suspicious activities they see along the shore or on the water.

  I look at one of the VTS controller’s twenty-one-inch screens and see the Del Norte, a high-speed Larkspur Ferry color-coded in blue, and the Miki Hana, a tug pulling an oil barge. Scott Humphries, the VTS training director, uses a mouse click to shift the monitor’s map to a different part of the bay complex. He can stack charts onscreen or bring up video images from a growing number of camera locations. He shows me live video of the Delta Pride, a bulk carrier carrying steel upriver to Pittsburg, California, close to where a couple of stray whales will soon pass.