Rescue Warriors

by David Helvarg

  The Healy’s official brochure describes its 1997 sideways launch at the Avondale shipyard in New Orleans as “spectacular,” which has a nicer ring to it than “disastrous.” What happened is the backsplash from the thirty-five-million-pound ship sent timbers, mud, sand, concrete, and torrents of water over the crowd of a thousand gathered for the launch. About half a dozen people were injured. “Hell Roaring” Mike Healy, the cutter’s hero namesake and a man little inclined to swoon at the sight of mud and blood, would have likely found some measure of mirth in the mishap.

  The front third of the Healy is called the “hotel.” This is where the crew and scientists stay and also houses various amenities like a gym and laundry. The midsection of the ship houses its engines and power plant, and the aft section with its labs and work decks is given over to science.

  I

  n a hallway outside the common dining mess (shared by officers, chiefs, and enlisted), I find a wooden plaque with photo inlays of Lt. Jessica Hill and Bosun’s Mate Second Class Steven Duque, two divers who died below the ice on August 17, 2006, at longitude 77-12.965 N. latitude 177-38.400 W.

  “Your spirit will endure always and you will never be forgotten,” reads their shipmates’ inscription.

  It was during an “ice liberty” on four-foot-thick pack ice almost five hundred miles north of Barrow, Alaska, that they decided to do a training dive without a real trainer on hand. At the time, diving was considered a “collateral” duty on the icebreakers. Having cut a hole in the ice by the ship’s bow, their plan was to do two twenty-foot-deep dives for twenty minutes each. A third diver who was to go with them had to climb out when his drysuit sprang a leak in the twenty-nine-degree water. He returned to the ship as crewmen and scientists continued to play football, drink beer, and do “polar bear” cannonballs into the below-freezing saltwater.

  Hill, thirty-one, and Duque, twenty-two, loaded up with more than sixty pounds of weights, gave brief instructions to their volunteer line handlers, and dropped below. The handlers felt the lines play out rapidly and thought the scuba divers were swimming under the ice’s surface. When the third diver returned later and saw that over two hundred feet had been let out, he ordered the two divers pulled back up. They showed no signs of life when they were hauled out, nor did an hour of CPR revive them. In the immediate aftermath of the fatal accident, the cutter’s CO, Capt. Douglas Russell, was relieved of duty (and subsequently replaced by Ted Lindstrom).

  A Coast Guard investigation later determined that the divers carried excessive weight that dragged them down to 187 and 220 feet, where they quickly ran out of air and died. Their dive plan and experience were inadequate for the situation, the report concluded. In addition, the scuba equipment in the ship’s dive locker had not been inspected in five years, and there was not an experienced dive master onboard nor a diver standing by at the surface as there should have been. In fact, at the time of their deaths there was not a certified Master Diver in the entire Coast Guard. As a result of this tragedy, the service revamped its dive program.

  Today the Deployable Operations Group has taken charge of the training and standardization of the program, establishing two permanent dive lockers with thirty-six divers each in California and Virginia. These dedicated divers are made available for specific missions on icebreakers and for port security and other purposes. In addition, the Guam-based buoy tender Sequoia continues to maintain its own dive team for aides to navigation work around shallow coral reefs in the Pacific.

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  hether breaking ice, diving or doing science or search and rescue, the role of the Coast Guard in the Arctic is a rapidly changing one.

  Throughout the forty-five years of the Cold War, much of the Coast Guard’s icebreaking mission in the Arctic was done in support of the Navy’s nuclear submarines and their underice warfare activities. If a nuclear war were to break out, the plan was to have U.S. ballistic missile subs, or “boomers,” break through the surface of the ice and rain mass death onto the cities and peoples of the Soviet Union. This was part of a larger plan that went by the acronym MAD—Mutually Assured Destruction.

  That apocalypse never happened. Today’s is a slower-moving one if no less frightening. It’s been in process since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution but only positively identified in the 1950s as the ongoing alteration of the planet’s climate through the addition of anthropogenic (human-sourced) pollutants, including carbon dioxide. Fossil-fuel-fired climate change has, among other impacts, replaced the Cold War with a “Cold Rush.”

  So I’m not surprised to find a pirate flag on the wall of the Healy’s computer lab. This was the hub of activity during their 2007 sea floor mapping expedition sponsored by the State Department at the same time Russia was planting a titanium flag on the seabed beneath the North Pole and Canada was war-gaming armed interdictions in the Northwest Passage. All are part of a frenzied rush by the Arctic powers—Russia, Canada, Norway, Denmark, and the United States—to seize new riches including oil, minerals, fish and trade routes.

  Under provisions of the UN’s Law of the Sea Treaty, countries can claim extensions of their two-hundred-mile Exclusive Economic Zones if they can document subsurface extensions of their continental shelves. Russia is one of the claimants of the Lomonosov Ridge that runs under the North Pole. The United States is looking to claim a submarine plateau called the Chukchi Cap that could extend the U.S. EEZ a hundred nautical miles into oil-rich waters.

  While ownership of vast parts of the Arctic remain in dispute, it’s clear that along our northern coast the United States is far from ready to deal with increased resource extraction, shipping, and tourism.

  “I have to be prepared to do everything we do in Los Angeles and be able to do it on this new frontier, this ‘fifth coast,’ but you can’t do that with normal ships,” warns Rear Adm. Gene Brooks, the 17th District commander of Coast Guard forces in Alaska.

  “When I got here in summer 2006, I traveled around and thought [that] by 2020, 2030 we’re gonna have to start working,” he tells me. “Only my first year convinced me climate change is already here.”

  “Global warming makes us more viable to the nation,” the Polar Sea’s CO, Capt. Carl Uchytil, argues without irony. We’re standing in his icebreaker’s loft con, its small black crow’s nest 105 feet up. “From here we can see out to where the ice ain’t,” he explains. “That way you sometimes find a route [through the ice] that’s less direct but easier.”

  Among the changes an ice-free Arctic is expected to bring is a dramatic shift in shipping routes between Asia and Europe, with commercial fleets of container ships, bulk carriers, and ice-hardened oil tankers using either the Northern Sea Route above Russia or moving through the Northwest Passage that Canada considers domestic waters but the United States and other countries claim is an international strait. In 1985, the Polar Sea crossed the icebound Northwest Passage without permission from Canada.

  “They protested when we did that,” Carl Uchytil recalls. “They flew Cessnas [small aircraft] over and dropped pamphlets asking us to respect Canadian sovereignty.”

  One of the legal requirements for declaring an international strait is its historic—and unchallenged—use by foreign vessels. These days the United States always “informs” Canada when it’s transiting the passage but doesn’t consider this a “request.” Canada considers it a request but never denies permission.

  Among surprises during the ice-free summer of 2007 was the transiting of three cruise ships through the Northwest Passage and the unannounced arrival of a shipload of four hundred German-speaking tourists on the beach in the Arctic town of Barrow, Alaska. A number of fishing boats were also seen moving from the Bering Sea into the Arctic Circle, following a shift of edible fish species north.

  The summer of 2008 became a test bed for the Coast Guard to assess its needs if maritime services are to be extended from southern and central Alaska to the fast-melting west and north. There were biweekly surveillance flights by
C-130 aircraft over the Chukchi and Beaufort seas and the Arctic Ocean, the establishment of a two-week lifesaving station with helicopters and small boats on the beach in Barrow, and a security operation with small boats at the oil facility in Prudhoe Bay.

  The Polar Sea also went on a multimission cruise that included fisheries law enforcement and community outreach to Shishmaref and Kivalina, two Native Alaskan towns among more than half a dozen on the Chukchi Sea considering evacuation as a result of coastal storm erosion linked to the loss of protective sea ice.

  As human activity increases in the Arctic region, the need for U.S. icebreakers will also increase. As Captain Uchytil points out, “As long as the earth is tilted twenty-three degrees from the sun there’s always going to be some ice at the poles.”

  A 2006 study by the National Research Council titled Polar Icebreakers in a Changing World: An Assessment of U.S. Needs recommended the construction of two new icebreakers that might cost up to a billion dollars each but could, along with the Healy, provide the United States the beginnings of an effective icebreaking fleet. In the interim the report calls for the continued use of the Polar Sea and continued standby status for the Polar Star.

  Admiral Brooks in Alaska thinks that he’ll soon need three or four new icebreakers and seven to nine ice-hardened patrol ships, “for a start.”

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  iding the Healy just before sunset, we encounter light showers and a double rainbow breaking over the Mukilteo Lighthouse at Point Elliot. A Washington State Ferry drifts through the color bands on the water.

  Two hours later we’re standing on the cutter’s darkened bridge getting a boat briefing from Bosun’s Mate First Class Billy Glenzer. He and Bosun’s Mate Third Class Andrew Yeckley will be taking me, a contractor, and a senior chief ashore. We’ll be riding a 22-foot rigid-hull inflatable. The air temperature is fifty-two, the water temperature forty-eight with light winds and a one- to two-foot chop. We’ll be wearing Mustang survival suits and crash helmets.

  After the briefing, we assemble on the open deck by the orange RHI’s starboard side cradle. When the boat’s ready, we climb aboard and sit up front with our backs against its inflated tubes. The winch release starts with a jerk as we’re clackity-clacked forty feet down the side of the ship into the water. As we begin to back off its forklift-like cradle, Yeckley reports the jet drive’s throttle is stuck in reverse. The winch hook is reattached and we’re cranked back up the side of the icebreaker. We walk over to the port side, where the ship’s second RHI is readied. Chief Kidd mans its winch control console. We’re again lowered into the water.

  This time all goes well, and we peel off toward the flickering lights of shore. Billy Glenzer makes his way to the bow with a handheld floodlight and scans the dark water ahead of us for floating debris as we thump along at thirty knots. Ten minutes later, we slow down and enter the Edmonds Marina, pulling in just past the fuel dock. We return our gear to the two Coasties and walk up a ramp to a parking lot, where my friends will soon meet me. The Healy, heading off into a northern ocean wilderness, won’t be back in these waters for over half a year.

  White Hull

  The Coast Guard’s forty Medium and High Endurance Cutters are the flag-ships of its deepwater fleet. Depending on their size they can deploy for six to eight weeks or three to six months. All but two of its twelve High Endurance Cutters are located on the West Coast and Hawaii. All but three of the Medium Endurance Cutters are stationed on the Atlantic Ocean, where distances and sea states tend to be less extreme. Of course, there’s always the exception.

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  n his book The Perfect Storm, author Sebastian Junger describes a harrowing SAR mission carried out during a historic New England blow on October 30, 1991, by the 205-foot Medium Endurance Cutter Tamaroa, a retrofitted World War II salvage tug. The “Tam” almost lost three crewmen putting a small boat over the side in an attempt to save three other people on a foundering sailboat. All six were later rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter.

  The Tam then steamed four hours to the sight of a downed Air National Guard helicopter. The Tam’s captain decided to send his people out on the deck in thirty- to forty-foot seas. Crouched on the slick, wind-battered deck that was seesawing 110 degrees and periodically being buried by breaking waves, they were able to use flares, ropes, and cargo nets draped over the side to recover four of the five airmen, hauling them out of the nighttime sea like billfish on a gaff. “I certainly hope that was the high point of my career,” the CO later joked, meaning it.

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  mong the large cutters I’ve visited are two stationed in Kodiak, Alaska: the 378-foot High Endurance Cutter Munro and a onetime Navy salvage ship, the 282-foot Medium Endurance Cutter Alex Haley. All other Medium Endurance Cutters are either 210 or 270 feet long. The 210s, built in the 1960s and upgraded in the 1980s and ’90s, tend to be top-heavy, to leak oil, and to require lots of maintenance, not unlike the 378s, which are also corroding and breaking down after more than three decades of service.

  “Only the Coast Guard would take a forty-year old ship, call it new, and expect to run it through 2015,” Cdr. Kevin Jones, CO of the Alex Haley, jokes about his hand-me-down ship with the slightly perverse pride of his service.

  The cutter is named after the Coast Guard’s first chief journalist, Alex Haley, who, as an African American, had to start his career as a “mess boy” in 1939. After twenty years of service that spanned World War II and the Korean War, he went on to global fame as collaborator on The Autobiography of Malcolm X and author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of slavery and family survival Roots, which later became a TV miniseries viewed by 130 million people.

  The ship that bears his name is also unique and distinctive. I notice how beamy it is as soon as I climb aboard. There’s room to walk past other folks in the passageways. The workspaces, mess, and berthing areas are wide and spacious enough to delight its crew of 105. The flight deck is one of the biggest in the service, though it didn’t feel that way when we were landing on it in those rolling seas off Hawaii.

  Launched in 1968 and later commissioned as the USS Edenton, it was handed over to the Coast Guard in 1997, given a $20 million makeover, rechristened Alex Haley, and sent to Alaska.

  Weighing three thousand gross tons, it’s just three hundred tons light of a High Endurance Cutter, and with a beam of fifty feet it’s actually seven feet wider. “She’s a fat-bottomed gal.” The CO Kevin Jones grins. “We’re lower and wider and slower. We’re a turtle, but we ride through the storms.”

  We’re sitting in the officers’ wardroom having a two-entrée meal of egg rolls and chipped beef, classic sailor’s grub that, when served on toast, is known as SOS (look it up). The talk turns to their recent hunt on Adak Island returning from their last cruise. They killed five caribou and had the carcasses, heads and all, curing on the fantail when Executive Officer Tony Williams reminded them to take the dead critters down before coming into port. It was December, and he worried his four-year-old daughter would think they’d killed Santa’s reindeer. It sounds like they had an exciting cruise even before the cariboucide.

  “We had a deep-fat fire under way with flames on the ceiling, and it flashed over, and the fire party took a half hour to put it out,” Kevin recounts. I’m actually not surprised they had a grease fire, as I discreetly slip one of the egg rolls off to the side of my plate. “One of the helicopters was launching, and since they’d gotten through the preflight [checklist] we decided to launch him as we fought the fire,” he continues. “Afterward the whole ship smelled like McDonald’s for a week, all the way up to the bridge.”

  If that wasn’t enough, they then hit one of the Bering Sea’s infamous low-pressure systems with thirty-foot seas and 105 mph winds.

  “They’re really just like unnamed hurricanes, and you know you’ll damage the ship, lose a mast, have portholes leak, but just pray no one’s hurt,” Kevin says. “So we’re icing up, and we try to find the lee side of an island [for protection—t
o cut down on the wind and wave size]. We get on the lee side of St. George, but it’s a small island only about one mile wide, so for three or four days we’re steaming back and forth for a mile. Then we got chased around by the next low.”

  That’s when they got a SAR call about a fishing boat in trouble and launched their HH-65 Dolphin helicopter off to Cold Bay.

  Kevin, a brushy-haired midcareer officer with a slightly hangdog look, shows me pictures from this second storm with an ice-covered flight deck and the ship’s bow buried in eighteen-foot seas.

  “We were directed toward Dutch Harbor, and the helicopter had [at some point during the SAR evolution] damaged a strut. So on December tenth we had to do a lily-pad HIFR under way.” That’s the emergency helicopter inflight refueling procedure, in which the 65 mechanic lowers the hoist cable to the deck of the rolling ship and a gas line is reeled back up and connected to a fuel plug in the door frame of the helicopter. “It was a hop, skip, and a jump where they flew from Cold Bay to us and on to Kodiak,” he explains before taking me on a tour of the bridge.

  Whereas the buoy tender Aspen and icebreaker Healy have advanced computerized steering systems on their bridges, the bridge of the Alex Haley would make a World War II cutter captain feel right at home. While it has the modern radar, digital charts, satellite communications, and other essentials for today’s multimission work, it also has a hard-to-miss bronze steering wheel and a leaning board that sailors—standing upright—brace against while driving the ship.