“So we back down, and he says, ‘Let’s finish this up.’ We had three hoists left to do, the captain, Aaron, and this crewmember. I have this next crewmember halfway up, and [pilot] Dave Neel, who’s flying left [side], spots this big wave coming and says we need to go up. Doug’s pulling power, and we got 105, 110 feet above the ship, and I finish the hoist and am pulling this guy in, and Dave is talking about the size of this wave, and I hear this smacking sound as it hits the ship and then, like a blowhole, this water had nowhere to go but up and whoosh—it’s like a fire hose is hitting me in the cabin. The guys in the 65 said they couldn’t see us for three or four seconds. We were totally engulfed in this rogue wave, and I’m screaming, ‘Up! Up! Up!’ and hear one engine flame out and could hear it shutting down—we just lost engine one. Over the course of five or six seconds they’re trying to fly us out, with alarms and whistles going off, and it got crazy ’cause number one is shut down and the rotor head is slowing down, losing RPMs, and a few seconds later I hear number two shut down, and I’m on the gunner’s belt and know what comes next and start to panic as we fall and bang, hit the ship. I knew by the bang we’d hit the ship, and I grabbed on to the door handle and hung on, and a second later we fall over and hit the water.
“We rolled, and it was dark and cold, and I never left the door. So now I’m upside down underwater in the dark, and everyone was losing their mind. I tried to swim out two or three times but couldn’t and realized I’m tethered to the helicopter, so I reach back and popped the clasp on the gunner’s belt, and then I came up and surfaced and I’m in shock, amazed I survived, and the 6020 [his helicopter] is upside down with no tail pylon, it must have gone when we hit the ship, and I can’t believe I’ve lived through a helicopter crash, and it’s cold, thirty-eight-degree water, and my hands and face are going numb, though I have on my drysuit and fleece underneath.
“I see the ship, but it’s too high to climb with no pilot ladder, and I can see mountaintops in the distance but not the beach because of these big waves, but I know the beach is at least half a mile away. Now suddenly I feel depressed, realizing I’m going to die right here, but I’m at least going to try to make it anyway, so I start swimming. It’s harder than it should be, so then I remember to blow up my vest, and it inflates and I’m swimming again but also choking on JPS [jet fuel] and getting pummeled by these waves. Then I see Dave Neel forty to fifty feet away, and out of the corner of my eye I see two other people.
“Then I see the 65 coming in to pick up Dave, and about twelve or fifteen minutes later while I’m still, well, more struggling than swimming, it comes back and puts the basket down next to me, and I get in, and as I’m going up in the basket I look back and see this eight-hundred-foot-long ship on the rocks and the helicopter still floating upside down a few hundred yards away, just beginning to sink now, and I see debris and a couple of people still in the water, and I get inside the cabin and plug in the ICS cord.
“Dave is in back, and Doug Watson comes up next. Dave had gotten out quick, but Doug had gotten hung up on his seat belt and was under for two minutes and had used up his whole air bottle [a small emergency compressed air system strapped to his vest].
“So we’d all survived (the aircrew). The fourth victim had gotten into the bunker oil, and he wouldn’t get in the basket but stayed hanging on to it, and so they lifted him that way and got him into the door 150 feet up and realized the cable was twisted around his neck, and he’d been hoisted by his neck!
“I saw [mechanic] Greg Gibbons struggle to free him, and he was covered, head to toe, black with oil, and I put him on his side so if he’s still alive he won’t swallow the oil. A few minutes later, he starts kicking and screaming. Greg is looking for this other guy lost in the oil, but with the surf conditions he couldn’t find him, and I scream at Greg, “He’s alive!” so they quit the search and head back to Dutch Harbor because this guy is in critical condition.
“The flight back was horrifying because we’re flying through this blizzard, these snow squalls, all these big guys in this 65 with this [injured] guy’s screaming going on and on, and I think we’re going to hit the mountains.
“We land, and they take this guy to the hospital, and his body core temperature is something like seventy-eight degrees and he’s covered in oil, but he survived. Funny thing is, at that point no one knew we’d crashed, so they’d left this truck for us, and we drove ourselves to the clinic.
“It took about another hour for the ship to break in half, and Aaron said he asked the captain what would happen and he’d said it would break and then he’d seen it bend and spark and they’re off there [floating away] on the bow.
“The 65 refueled [on the Alex Haley] and headed back and hoisted them [swimmer Aaron Bean and the ship’s captain] from two hundred feet up. Greg said he had orange cable in his hand, which is the last twenty feet of cable. Aaron said the basket came down sideways like a kite it was blowing so hard.
“We thought he was dead and they thought we were dead, and later when we went from the clinic to the hotel there was Aaron, alive, and we gave him a huge hug.
“So that 60 went down and six out of ten people were lost, but we [the flight crew] made it. I can only attribute that to our training, to practicing to where it [escape from a helicopter upside down in cold, dark water] becomes instinctual. Later they estimated that rogue wave was over sixty feet high.”
He pauses.
“You know, something like that happening, it changes you.” At that moment he reminds me of Joe Ruggiero, who survived the suicide boat attack off Iraq that killed Nate Bruckenthal. He has that same kind of nervous post-traumatic intensity of feeling.
He tells me how he’d recently bought sandwich makings to take home to his wife and left the grocery bags in the back of his truck and went into the video store, and when he came out the ravens had trashed the bags, bread rolls were all over the street, and half a pound of cheese was gone. “I called my wife and was so upset, and she said, ‘Brian, listen to yourself. You’re shouting at a bunch of birds.’ ”
I
call Public Affairs Specialist Richard Brahm, who offers to pick me up from the restaurant. On the way over, he almost gets into a collision when the car in front of him hits a deer. The deer slides sideways on the icy road, picks itself up, and bounds off into the forest, apparently unharmed.
It’s hard not to love a frontier like Alaska. It’s also hard to appreciate that even a vast and seemingly pristine frontier like Alaska is vulnerable to human disruption from activities such as industrial overfishing or the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill that covered Prince William Sound and its coastline in eleven million gallons of crude oil, killing millions of fish, half a million seabirds, thousands of sea otters, hundreds of seals and bald eagles, twenty killer whales, and even a few oil-soaked grizzlies. The marine environment, measured by rates of productivity and reproduction, has never fully recovered, nor have local fishing and Native Alaskan communities. Twenty years later, oil residues can still be found in many shoreline areas simply by digging a foot or two below the surface.
Capt. Andy Berghorn, CO of Kodiak Air Station, was there.
“We did a lot of overflights trying to gain the big picture. It was a frustrating time, and we realized we didn’t have the resources to handle something that big. It was hard to see one of the most beautiful places on earth destroyed. You don’t think it’ll happen in your own backyard and then it does. We weren’t prepared.”
Today, along with plans for new mineral mining, gas pipelines, and offshore oil drilling, Alaska is facing an even larger threat to terrestrial and marine habitat, coastal regions, and native cultures from fossil-fuel-fired climate change.
Still, the Coast Guard’s role as guardian and steward of our public seas is not what it was before the changes wrought by 9/11. Nor, despite claiming a maritime strategy for safety, security, and stewardship, is it clear that the service’s historic commitment to environmental protection is going to be ful
ly restored or expanded anytime soon.
CHAPTER 10
Duck Scrubbers
“There’s less environmental work. We’re energized and challenged by what’s
most urgent and compelling [homeland security], so some stuff has been
pushed back more than we wished.”
—VICE COMMANDANT VIVIEN CREA
“The Exxon Valdez defined the first ten years of my career,
and 9/11 is defining the next ten.”
—LT. CDR. CLAUDIA GELZER, BOSTON CHIEF OF PORT OPERATIONS
Oil-covered birds like you’ve seen on TV look even worse in real life. Not the dead ones so much, except when a gull’s ripped a small floating grebe open in the water and is pulling at its toxic guts.
Hong Kong–based shipping executives don’t have to use ships that burn heavy bunker fuel, the cancer-causing dregs of the petroleum process, but they do. After you’ve refined aviation fuel and gasoline and kerosene, diesel and heating oil, you’re left with bunker fuel. The only thing you can process after that is roofing tar. Of course, cleaner fuels would prove marginally more expensive, and U.S. consumers might have to pay a penny extra for their tube socks or Chinese-made children’s toys.
Besides, with modern navigation charting, radar, Vessel Traffic Systems, trained crews, and experienced pilots, it’s not like a large container ship is going to ram into the San Francisco Bay Bridge in the fog and spill fifty-three thousand gallons of that nasty stuff into the water. Which, of course, is exactly what happened on Wednesday morning, November 7, 2007, when the 901-foot Cosco Busan hit the base of one of the bridge towers.
Investigators were left shaking their heads in amazement as they tracked the “human error” involved. Coast Guard controllers at the VTS on Yerba Buena Island tried to warn the ship’s pilot he was running parallel to the bridge and heading for trouble, but he claimed otherwise. Two minutes later, he took a sharp turn and hit the bridge. Unlike air traffic controllers, the Coast Guard’s VTS operators did not have the authority to overrule the pilot or the ship’s Chinese captain and order them to change course. A new law has since been proposed to give them that authority.
There’s also the question of scale. “Ships are so large now that you don’t need an oil tanker for a major spill. Fuel can be a major spill,” says Adm. Craig Bone, commander of the 11th District, which includes California. The Cosco Busan was carrying twenty-five hundred large shipping containers. There are now ships that carry over ten thousand. Yet giant cargo ships, unlike oil heavy tankers, aren’t required to have a tug escort when they enter or leave San Francisco Bay, even on the foggiest of days.
I
’m sitting by the dock of the bay—that’s what Otis Redding called the Berkeley Municipal Pier in his famous song. Only now it smells like a gas station. On the rock pile below me a surf scoter—a diving duck—is using the bottom of its red bill to preen its oil-blackened feathers. It shakes its head and carefully repeats the process for the half hour I’m there. When I make too sudden a move, it flaps its wings like it’s going to flee into the water, where it would likely die of hypothermia, its natural insulation ruined by the oil. I’ll see dozens more oiled birds today: scoters, grebes, gulls, a ruddy duck, and cormorants.
The Berkeley marina behind me has a big oily sheen. “Rainbows of oil” is a misnomer. Gasoline leaves rainbow sheens. Bunker fuel leaves green and brown streaks and smudges like marbled meat gone bad. It leaves floating tar balls and disks and globular curlicue pieces and concentrations of hard, asphalt-like toxic chips.
It’s been raining throughout the afternoon. The experts aren’t sure whether this will help the cleanup efforts. There are nineteen agencies, including the Coast Guard, involved. The oil has spread out through the Golden Gate to Ocean Beach and north to Point Reyes National Seashore. Horseshoe Cove by Surf Station Golden Gate is badly fouled. Angel Island and Alcatraz are a mess.
The western grebe lies exhausted on a rock in the Richmond Marina, where I now live. Stained black, its red eyes seem to burn at me with anger and reproach. I know that’s anthropomorphic thinking. As humans we understand that we’re killing them, whereas they have no idea what’s killing them. The next day they boom off my neighborhood wetland to keep the oil out, though some has already gotten into the salt marsh.
Fifty-three thousand gallons isn’t even a large spill compared to dozens of historic disasters like the eight million gallons released in and around the Gulf of Mexico after Hurricane Katrina or the eleven million gallons from the Exxon Valdez in 1989 that devastated the pristine waters and wildlife of Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Shortly after the Cosco Busan spill, the Black Sea and the Korean peninsula are hit by massive oil spills in orders of magnitude larger.
As darkness falls, I encounter a young couple near my home, Amber Kirst and Scott Egan. She’s walking below the rocks in the pouring rain with her white pants oil-stained at the ankles, wearing a protective rubber glove and carrying a bag full of oiled litter and dead crabs. “We’ve got a live crab, too. He was in a Cheetos bag,” she tells me, climbing up the rocks to the pathway. “We drove down from Lodi to volunteer, but they said they’d get back to us. It’s an hour-and-a-half drive. We needed to do something.”
She shows me the little Cheetos crab, with its dark shell. It’s still alive. “Should I put it back? Is it too oiled for them to feed on?” She looks at the hundreds of shorebirds hunting in the exposed mudflats and floating just beyond. “It’s all so depressing,” she concludes before climbing back down to pick up more oiled litter.
We build our homes in floodplains; we move millions of tons of goods and fuel through marine sanctuaries; we continue to burn a product that, used as directed, overheats our planet. Amber and Scott came from Lodi. They needed to do something. We all do.
I’m disappointed that the Coast Guard didn’t do more. I believe if it had been a terrorist who had put a gaping hole in the side of that ship, their response would have been much more robust. It turns out that they’re over a year behind in their review of response plans for spills from large cargo vessels like this one. They’re eighteen years behind on writing final regulations for the Oil Spill Prevention Act of 1990.
On January 11, 2008, outside reviewers commissioned by the Coast Guard publish a 130-page report on the initial response to the spill, detailing what went wrong and what worked. Among the things they find is that a lack of oil-spill training by the first Coast Guard responders contributed to their inability to do an accurate assessment of the spill size. Five of the sector’s six marine casualty investigators were not fully qualified, according to a later finding, and the Coast Guard failed to get a state investigator who was qualified out to the damaged ship in a timely manner. The Vessel Traffic System and the Incident Command Center on Yerba Buena Island were also not working together or using the same radio frequencies. The Coast Guard report includes a time line on the response. I have my own time line that reflects the lack of urgency I sensed.
W
hen I heard the news that a ship had hit the Bay Bridge that morning of November 7, I called my public affairs contact to confirm that my interview with Admiral Bone was still on. I was assured the problem was being handled at the sector level and the admiral would be available. At two o’clock I had a two-and-a-half-hour interview with Craig Bone, who before taking over the 11th District had been assistant commandant for prevention (now called assistant commandant for marine safety, security, and stewardship), considered the top regulatory and environmental job in the Coast Guard. At six-one, slim, with silver hair and copper-rimmed glasses, he exudes confidence and authority. I ask about that morning’s ship collision with the bridge.
“Helicopters are up. Cutters are on the water. A unified command is operating. This is a perfect example of how the ICS [Incident Command System] works as a way to flow forces and organize everyone to do effective business,” he assures me.
Of course, it only works if you have the right information, resou
rces, and trained people on the water. Even as we spoke, the ship was reporting that 140 gallons of fuel had spilled from its 8:30 A.M. collision. The first Coast Guard vessel (from Yerba Buena Island between the bridge’s two spans) took forty-three minutes to arrive on scene. Despite mariners’ reports of extensive oil on the water, the Coast Guard didn’t realize it was actually a 58,000-gallon spill—an estimate later revised down to 53,500—until 4:49 P.M., when they finished testing the fuel tanks. The Captain of the Port, William Uberti, didn’t notify the public or city of San Francisco about its actual size until nine that night, having earlier turned away an offer of help from a San Francisco fireboat. With fog and mechanical issues, the first Coast Guard helicopter wasn’t airborne and assessing the situation until 4:40 that afternoon.
Admiral Bone points out that maritime accidents like this didn’t stop after 9/11. “The port industry didn’t stop growing, and every port grew, and demand for offshore resources is growing, and worldwide shipyards are all booked up [building more ships]. Meanwhile we [the Coast Guard] shifted assets to security, and we failed to keep pace on the safety and environmental side. We couldn’t provide it at the same level. Also, you have this inability to take people off for advanced training, so our inspection and [maritime accident] investigation expertise has suffered.” It’s something that deeply troubles him and that he’ll speak frankly about during congressional field hearings called by California representatives outraged by the spill response.
The Coast Guard’s program for response training in places like San Francisco Bay has been cut back in recent years, as has the state’s Oil Spill Prevention and Response staff and the size of the private contractors’ standby crews.
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