“Once we got there we saw logs and things [oil, floating debris] and Good Samaritan vessels and did a track search about two hundred feet off the water and found six more people, and these big cargo ships recovered them. Three were still alive [after more than three days], but it was too late for the others. We kept searching for four more days but with negative response. We never saw any more people or rafts, just lots of logs.”
Still, thirteen lives saved and three bodies recovered out of twenty-two is an impressive accomplishment for a ten-thousand-square-mile search conducted on one of the most remote stretches of our ocean planet.
A
s far from help as the Hai Tong No. 7 was that stormy July, that’s how far the state of Hawaii will be from help if it gets hit by another major hurricane like Iniki, which devastated the island of Kauai in 1992, or an earthquake, tsunami, or other large-scale disaster. Present emergency response plans include attempts to evacuate tourists and the injured while the rest of the state hunkers down.
“We often talk about what we’ll do,” says center supervisor Matt Salas. “If things happen here, it won’t be like the mainland. We’ll have to fend for ourselves. The Department of Defense [with existing military bases in Hawaii] will have to play a major role because we [the Coast Guard] won’t be able to surge assets the way we did to New Orleans. We’re planning for seventy-two hours or more for Hawaii to be on its own with no airports or functioning harbors.”
Kodiak
Alaska doesn’t have many airports or functioning harbors unless you count gravel landing strips and fishing docks, but it’s huge. If you superimposed a map of the state over a map of the lower forty-eight, its southeast would touch the coast of Georgia, while the end of the Aleutians would reach California. Alaska is four times the size of California but with less than one-fiftieth the population. If caribou could vote, its congressional delegation would have wet noses and antlers.
“It’s the most magnificent and terrible place I’ve ever known,” says Rear Adm. Gene Brooks, the Coast Guard’s 17th District commander for Alaska. “It has wild vistas that just make your heart hurt to look at them, but also the line between life and death here is very thin.”
Along with natural resources including oil, fish, forests, and fresh water, Alaska has one-third of the U.S. coastline, the emptiest, roughest third. Throughout its history as a territory and a state, its coasts and oceans have also been a primary area of responsibility for the U.S. Coast Guard.
As a frontier region, Alaska attracts its share of adventurers, visionaries, and fools: those with big plans, an oversized sense of self-worth, or a willingness to risk all in order to get ahead. Even today commercial fishing remains the most dangerous profession and fishing off Alaska among the riskiest places to practice that profession, a reality reflected in the Discovery Channel TV series The Most Dangerous Catch.
B
ack in 2002, pilot Melissa Rivera was flying an HH-60 Jayhawk out of Cold Bay, Alaska, a forward base, during the red king crab season. She’d just landed after a five-hour patrol when word came that there’d been an explosion on a 160-foot fish-processing vessel named the Galaxy and that there were three people in the water.
“It would take two and a half hours to get there, and we were dressed up [in drysuits], so I said, ‘We’ll take it.’ ” She and her crew were put on waivers allowing them to fly over six hours, gassed up, and relaunched.
“Halfway there we get word the fire is out of control and there are twenty-six people in the water. So now we have some discussion about what we’re going to do, and luckily when we get there, there are three other fishing vessels converging on the scene and a life raft in the water.
“From what we could see there were still six people onboard on the bow and the stern. Also the pilothouse, which was on the stern, was burning. The three people by the pilothouse were standing on stanchions, and the deck was smoking and bubbling around them, and there were twenty-foot seas and there were downed wires and debris around them, so we didn’t want to put the basket on the deck.
“We tried to get the basket close to them, but a pyro [explosives] locker blew up just then, so we had to pull back.
“It was a thirty- to forty-foot drop to the water, and we didn’t want to ask them to go into the water without survival suits, but we couldn’t think of anything else.
“So we put our swimmer, Jason Quinn, in the water. We could see the stern would rise up in these seas where you could see the [propeller] screws, and there was all this oil in the water. The first of them jumped, and the swimmer dragged him into the basket, and we got him up. The cable wrapped around the next survivor after he jumped, but Jason got it off him, and we got all three of them up. One of the three on the bow jumped and was taken up by a fishing boat, and we lifted the next one, and the skipper came up last. He had third-degree burns on his arms where he’d gone into the radio room and made the mayday call on these melting radios and also thrown survival suits to his people. We hoisted another survivor from a Good Samaritan boat who wasn’t breathing and did CPR on him all the way to St. Paul. He didn’t survive, but twenty-three of the twenty-six survived.
“[Air Station] Kodiak launched two C-130s, and one of them came out to the loran station on St. Paul with a gasbag [large fuel bladder] so we could fly the helo back, but we’d flown nine and a half hours, so we rode back with the C-130 and ended up in Kodiak. We flew again the next day because one of those Good Samaritan crew . . . The storm had gotten worse during the night, and one of them who was wearing a black raincoat fell overboard, and we flew a search for him but never found him.”
I
’m flying a C-130 Hercules out of Cold Bay in the winter of 2008. The load-master has just winched a white Durango SUV onto the plane. It was driven by HH-60 crews during the red crab season and is now being redeployed to St. Paul Island in the middle of the Bering Sea for the opilio, or snow crab, season. Like orcas and eagles, Coast Guard cutters and helicopters follow the fisheries, acting as 911 for “the deadliest catch,” while also protecting the resource.
Cold Bay itself is a collection of half a dozen metal airplane hangars and scattered wooden houses on a low rise leading to an open bay facing snow-and-ice-shrouded dragons’ teeth of jagged volcanic peaks that mark the end of the five-hundred-mile Alaska peninsula and the beginning of the Aleutian chain.
While there, we dropped off a few Coasties and off-loaded a pallet of supplies including cases of Budweiser for the sixty local residents who maintain the ten-thousand-foot runway that functions as an alternative landing strip for the space shuttle.
When we touched down, a Dolphin helicopter off the cutter Jarvis was waiting to meet us with a crewmember on emergency leave. Also waiting is Petty Officer First Class Wil Milam, who will be swapping out with another rescue swimmer. Wil [I forgot to ask if he lost his second L on the job] will ride with us to St. Paul, then back to Kodiak and from there head on to Washington, DC, where he’s been invited to be one of five armed services representatives at the State of the Union Address thanks to a rescue he pulled off on February 10, 2007.
Wil is a seal-shaped, bullet-headed swimmer with gelled brown hair and lively gray eyes who has worked in Kodiak for the last ten years. At forty-one, he’s one of the old men of the nineteen-man Kodiak swimmer shop. Actually it’s eighteen men and Jodi Williams, who showed her toughness by reporting back for duty two weeks after giving birth. She’d prepared by doing eight-mile runs while eight months pregnant. Not all Kodiak’s swimmers are happy on the job, however.
“I came up here expecting The Guardian. I’ve been here three years and only got wet for the first time last week [hoisting two fishermen],” swimmer Luke Cotturone complains. “Mostly it’s medical evacuations. My first SAR case was a woman six months pregnant going into premature labor with vaginal bleeding.”
Wil, by contrast, is a happy camper. He’s also the station’s winter survival camp instructor and an avid hunter and fisherman. He’s kille
d two Kodiak bears, one with an arrow, the other in self-defense.
On the night of his big case the cutter Mellon, on which he and his Dolphin 65 crew were deployed, had pulled into Dutch Harbor.
“About 11:45 we get a report of an EPIRB going off forty miles away. It’s really snotty out. The wind’s blowing sideways, and this storm has knocked out power to Dutch Harbor, and one in the morning we’re out there getting buffeted around in thirty- to fifty-knot winds 150 feet off the water and we’re getting close. We see a blinking light and a steady light . . . and just then someone yells, ‘Flare!’ and a flare goes up and glows red in the clouds, and we fly over a raft and I hear the pilot on the ICF [helmet radio line] saying, ‘Rescue checklist part one for a swimmer deployment,’ and I think, ‘Hey, that’s me.’
“So we opened the door, and I could see the raft getting tossed around below—like that hurricane scene in The Guardian. They lower me [on the hook] and as soon as I get in the water I can’t see the raft anymore because of these fifteen- to twenty-foot seas, but you know the helicopter searchlight is lighting it up, and it’s twenty degrees off the door, so I swim toward it and pull up onto the raft and instead of survival suits find four Russian guys in street clothes.
“They’re speaking broken English, and one of them is already out cold, so I radio up and say, ‘I got four guys down here without suits, so deliver the basket as close as possible.’ One minute later, the pilot radios, ‘We’ll send down our aircrew survival suits,’ and that sounds like a good idea, so the suits come down on the trail line.
“I’m straddling the raft and go in to pull them down and suddenly feel forty-degree water rushing into my [dry]suit. I figure this plastic T-handle for the zipper must have hung up on the raft ladder, and my [suit] legs are now full of water and I can’t lift them, so I get the skipper to help pull me back in. I’m totally soaked and pulling the trail line to the hook where they’ve attached the drysuits, but two come loose and are floating away, so I jump back in and take off and get them and kick back, and the skipper helps pull me in again, and we finally get the suits on them, and the basket comes down and is jerked away as a wave breaks on it. I get the first [unconscious] guy in it, and now he wakes up and tries to climb out of the basket and gets combative. I push him back down, and up he goes.
“The raft’s now floated fifty yards away from me, so I signal for an emergency pickup. I get in the basket, and when they get me in the helicopter I can’t get out. They have to pour me out of it, and the suit’s so full, there’s so much pressure, the water comes gushing out my neck seal. I get on the ICS and tell them I’m soaked.
“They say there’s only fifteen minutes of gas left before Bingo [the time they have to leave]. I tell them, ‘We can’t get those three in the basket on their own, so lower me back down in the basket.’ They’re like, ‘Are you sure, Wil?’ because they said my voice was slurred at that point, and I did feel nauseous. So I forced myself to vomit at the door and then went back down and grabbed the first guy to take him in the water and put him in the basket. He wants to sit on the side of it, so I put him down, and he sits up, and I have to punch him in the chest, and then he goes up. I turn and swim ten yards to the raft and signal for the next guy to get into the water, and he’s less combative, and we get him up.
“The last guy stands up in the raft and jumps over my head trying to jump into the basket and flips it over 180 degrees in the water. Now the cable is wrapped around the basket. I put him in a cross-chest carry and am trying to untangle the cable from the basket and hook, and a wave breaks over us and he gets lost.
“Then I see him coming back at me, and he jumps me ’cause now he’s in full panic mode and I’m just a floating object to climb on, so I do a modified front head hold—I jam the heel of my hand into his chin, then get him in a control cross-chest hold, only I need at least one hand free to work on the cable, and he gets away again. Now he has cable around his neck, and I try to get that free but also have to kick him away. He swims back at me a third time, and I give him another palm to the face and get him under control and in the basket, and up he goes.
“Now I’m supposed to pop the raft [sink it with a knife so it doesn’t get spotted again], but forget that. I’m going hypothermic, and I remember the basket coming down, and I think I’m swimming, but the mechanic says I was just sort of pawing the water [he demonstrates fluttering his hands from tucked elbows]. They sort of drug it under me and I dropped into it, and I remember being back in the helicopter and the four fishermen in the back of this small copter and giving them the thumbs-up, and they patted me on the head and gave me the thumbs-up. I don’t remember talking to the crew but remember landing and ambulances and fire lights in the rain. Later, in my report, I recalled walking two survivors to the ambulance, and the pilot said, ‘No, that was me and the EMT taking you to the ambulance.’
“I remember coming to and not being able to move my arms because I’m wrapped in heated blankets under heat lamps and getting a fourth IV bag of warmed saline solution. What really woke me up was this female voice of a doctor saying, ‘Let’s get another rectal temperature from Mr. Milam,’ and I say, ‘No, that’s OK.’
“ ‘How do you feel?’ she asked, and I said, ‘I need to take a pee,’ ’cause I did, and I said, ‘I feel wooped.’ ”
B
ack on the icy runway in Cold Bay, I talk to the swimmer who’s replacing Wil on the Jarvis. He’s not too impressed. “If it was me it would’ve been just another SAR case ’cause I wouldn’t have broken my zipper.”
We take off with Wil and two other passengers, SAR sleds, and the Dodge Durango in the back. I’m standing on the large glassed-in flight deck with five of the Herc’s seven crewmembers including pilots Craig Breitung and Steve Axley and navigator David Boschee, who guided a recent C-130 flight over the North Pole to publicize the Coast Guard’s increased “Arctic domain awareness,” in response to global warming.
“Show me anywhere where you can prove sea level has actually risen or you can say humans had anything to do with it,” Steve grouses. I mention that I’ve been reporting on climate change for fifteen years and the science is pretty robust. Most scientists agree humans are loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases that heat up the planet.
“Yeah, scientists also say we’re related to apes,” he responds with an effective conversation stopper.
The big four-engine plane’s cargo bay is about the size of a large railroad boxcar with a drop-down ramp in back. It’s the Coast Guard’s all-purpose aircraft.
Two months earlier, a C-130 dropped a rescue raft right on top of Kodiak fisherman Alan Ryden as he was being tossed about the Gulf of Alaska by twenty-foot seas and fifty-knot winds. His boat had flipped, and he’d been in the water most of the night with only his survival suit and a life ring. After scrambling into the raft, he was later picked up by another fishing boat. It was a “pretty good drop,” everyone agrees.
Today’s flight is a “log,” or logistics mission. We fly out over the Bering Sea above the clouds. Approaching St. Paul in the Pribilof Islands, we can see a towering weather front moving over the small island toward the airstrip. We fly past its snowed-in Aleut town of five hundred, two factory fishing trawlers, and a tall broadcast tower before leaning right toward the runway that looks like a black asterisk in a white cloud bank.
“You’re going down to 1,800 feet,” Steve announces. “I can see the island popping through . . . ceiling down to 850 feet, 800 feet . . .”
“We’re going to do a missed approach,” Craig announces as we pull up and veer away before circling back out over the ocean. He spots some ice on his window wiper and asks someone to look back at one of the black dots on the wings to see if they’re streaking white, which could indicate icing. They’re not.
“You’ve got about an hour to monkey around up here before Bingo for thirty,” Scott Lynch, the bald, walrus-mustached radioman, informs him.
“It’s clear here but blowing over the air
port,” Craig says as we hit some blue sky. “I guarantee I’m not landing with a tailwind,” he adds with grim humor I don’t get just then. “It’s always socked in here,” he tells me.
Two days before, an eleven-year-old girl had a sledding accident; she broke her leg and had a head wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding. Because the civilian air ambulance couldn’t get in, Kodiak sent a C-130 to take her to the hospital in Anchorage.
A hole emerges out of the surrounding clouds. We take another run at the airstrip, landing through blowing white mist onto what’s now two inches of runway snow. As we turn and taxi, I ask Craig about a C-130 he commanded that crashed here in July of 2006. Its central wing-box and tail assembly are back at the Kodiak hangar getting ready to be used as replacement parts.
“Typically, landing with a ten-knot tailwind on a sixty-five-hundred-foot runway is not done in the lower forty-eight, and I got some negative feedback, and I’m a little bitter,” he says. “Up here in Alaska, people land with thirty-knot tailwinds. It had nothing to do with what happened. Both props on one side malfunctioned, and we controlled it, but the brakes didn’t stop us, and rather than have the aircraft go off the runway I put it in reverse and spun to the left.”
The nose and underbelly were crunched, and a propeller tore off when a wing hit the ground, but it was still what’s called a good crash in that everyone walked away unharmed.
They shut down the plane, and we climb out and watch a mile-high wall of gray cloud front moving across the far side of the field.
Rescue Warriors Page 29